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My All-Time Favorite Moment of Providence

Few people today know how close the world came to disaster in May 1941. Adolf Hitler came within a whisker of winning World War II. He basically lost it because he took on too many enemies at once, but in that month, it was still just him and Britain at war. The German navy thought they had the perfect plan to bring the war to a conclusion right before Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Britain needed unceasing convoys of imports to sustain her people and her war effort, so the Kriegsmarine decided to strangle her with its most powerful weapon, the battleship Bismarck. The world’s most powerful warship would go up the North Sea, sail between Greenland and Iceland, and then sink as much of Britain’s precious cargo as it wanted.

Part of what made this so exciting was that it was a desperate enterprise on both sides. The British had more ships, so the Bismarck had to avoid being caught at all costs, but if she could take the Royal Navy on one ship at a time, victory was all but assured. The Bismarck had an inestimable advantage (gun-control advocates, take note): the British had abided by the naval limitation treaties when they had designed their ships while the Germans had flagrantly ignored them. The British ships could match the Bismarck’s firepower, but they had had to make cuts in tonnage somewhere, so their ships had smaller, slower engines. If the Bismarck could just reach the vastness of the North Atlantic, she could commerce-raid with all but impunity.

Once the British detected the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen with their radar in the Denmark Strait, which lies between Greenland and Iceland, the battlecruiser HMS Hood and battleship Prince of Wales steamed to intercept her. The breath-taking Hood had acquired an illustrious reputation before the war, but the British squadron had some serious disadvantages. The Prince of Wales was still under construction, with civilian contractors still working on her as she sailed to the battle, and the Hood, for the sake of speed, had very thin deck armor. The British planned to make up for this by rushing in close to minimize plunging fire, but they lost contact with the Germans in the night and had to grope their way in from the side. This meant that the Germans had the very advantageous position of “crossing the British T.” The Bismarck and Prinz Eugen could send plunging fire at the British from all their guns while the British could only reply with their forward-facing turrets.

The battle was a brief, vicious disaster. The Bismarck blew the Hood up, killing all but 3 of her crew of 1,400, and the Prince of Wales had to retreat with a jammed turret. The British public was shocked, and the way into the North Atlantic was open- or was it? In the brief exchange of gunfire, the British had scored one good hit in the Bismarck’s fuel tanks. Instead of turning her loose in the open ocean, the German admiral had to put in for repairs in France. Strategically, this was more of an inconvenience than anything else, since the Bismarck could leave France into the Atlantic as soon as she was repaired.

As the other British ships scrambled to catch the Bismarck, the British had to call in airpower. In this they were still badly handicapped. Their search planes were the modern American-built PBY Catalinas, but their torpedo bombers were Swordfish biplanes, little more advanced than a World War I fighter. They were slow and fired only one torpedo. The British launched an air strike, but it did nothing to stop the Bismarck, which soon eluded them. The only good news was that the Bismarck’s anti-aircraft guns had been designed to shoot at faster, more modern planes, so they couldn’t be adjusted slow enough to hit the Swordfish. That was, no doubt, small comfort when the Bismarck got away with minimal damage from one torpedo hit. After a tense search, an American pilot found the Bismarck in his Catalina, but the news wasn’t promising.

By the evening of May 26, it must have looked to the British like the war was lost. The Bismarck was too far ahead for any British ship to catch her, and in the morning, she would be in range of air cover from France. The Luftwaffe could chew up the antiquated Swordfish like sardines, so the British needed what Ludovic Kennedy called, “a miracle.” With enough daylight left for one final strike, the British sent the Swordfish out again.

And they got their miracle! The last torpedo fired- the last torpedo the British couldfire- hit the Bismarck in just about its only vulnerable spot. The Bismarck’s only real design flaw was that she couldn’t steer using her propellers rather than her rudder. By something too coincidental and earth-shaking to be called mere Chance, the British torpedo had hit the Bismarck’s rudder just as the ship was turning and stuck it in a course back to the British fleet. Other ships might have manipulated their propellers into changing course, but the Bismarck couldn’t. In an instant the war had gone from being hopelessly lost to being winnable!

The next morning, the British set upon the Bismarck with their battleships HMS King George V and Rodney, as well as several smaller vessels. The Bismarck didn’t stand a chance. The British shells shredded her until the Germans scuttled the ship to avoid capture. Germany would never again come so close to defeating Britain. In a month she had made the catastrophic blunder of attacking the Soviet Union, and by year’s end she had declared war on the US.

A godly Presbyterian once said, “He who doesn’t see the hand of God in this is blind,” and I think much the same can be said of that torpedo. The British had only the remotest chance of catching the Bismarck at that point, and they scored the one hit that could do it just under the wire. From a Presbyterian point of view, God does things the hard way like this so He can demonstrate His wisdom and power to redound to His glory. I’ll explore, Lord willing, this unpopular belief in a future post, so stay tuned. In the meantime, whenever you’re discouraged and feel like giving up from doing the right thing, think of that providential torpedo hit that saved the world at the last possible second.

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My Choice of Apologetics, Part IV: What Do You Suppose about That?

So, by now you’ve figured out Presuppositionalism is the one I have a problem with. I suppose part of it is that my first encounter with it was the video series How to Answer the Fool, which it seemed the producer was trying to present in the most confusing manner possible. He had the film cutting back from scene to scene in a most disjointed manner. I think I got the gist of it well enough, though, and I didn’t like what I understood. The basic premise, I believe, is that subjecting God to the kind of objective human analysis involved in Classical apologetics and Evidentialism is an affront to His dignity and sovereignty and that your senses are too unreliable to base any conclusions off of them anyway. The answer, they say, is to start with the assumption that God exists, and then everything makes sense and you have a 100% sure basis for your knowledge.

Now, I respect that the Presuppositionalists want to uphold the glory of God. I also agree that, once you start off with the premise that God is good and man is evil, everything starts to make more sense. What they do, though, is, I think, different from the way Scripture does it. First of all, I don’t think it’s demeaning to God to try to reason with others based on evidence and logic. What then is the point of all the signs throughout the Bible? Dr. Sproul would have stood me down that the miracles in the Bible are to validate the prophet’s authority rather than prove God’s existence, which is already assumed in the Bible, and that’s true for many, if not most of them, but there are some signs that are clearly for God proving Himself. Just looking at Isaiah, God welcomes Ahaz to request any sign he wants to prove His promised deliverance. He gives Hezekiah at least two signs of that deliverance, which is clearly not to validate Isaiah since Hezekiah knows he’s a prophet already. Most importantly, He challenges the idolaters in Chapter 41 to pick their God/gods based off of whose prophecy comes true in a manner very pleasing to an Evidentialist. And let’s not forget that the whole point of the sign in Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal is to show Israel that the Lord is their God and Baal isn’t. Granted God gets very angry at those who demand more proof than He has given them, but He doesn’t seem to mind giving us reasons to believe.

In what I think is Presuppositionalism’s biggest flaw, though, take Romans 1. Paul says that we know God exists by seeing Creation and reasoning back to a Creator. That’s what Classical apologetics and Evidentialism do, but not only do Presuppositionalists refuse to do that, some of them say the others are ethically wrong to. Paul also refers to God writing His law on humanity’s heart in Romans, so the Moral argument is also Biblical.

As far as sensory perception goes, I agree it’s not 100% reliable. I will also point out, however, that the Apostle John makes his apologetic defense in the first verses of I John based off of his senses: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the word of life.” That’s three of the five senses right there! John is giving his senses as one of the reasons he believes. In other words, they’re usually reliable enough to form reasonable opinions based on.

Not only that, but this approach is a logically flawed theory that rests on circular reasoning. Circular reasoning, from a logician’s point-of-view, is where you start with your conclusion as one of the premises. Basically, Presuppositionalism says, “God exists. This further premise. That further premise. Therefore, God exists.” You haven’t proved anything because you assumed what you were setting out to prove from the get-go!

I don’t know how effective Presuppositionalism is in practice (if it converts souls, never mind my objections!), but it’s not nearly as logically sound as Classical Apologetics, Evidentialism, or the Moral Standard. I take strong exception to the claim that those three are sinful methods because I can find them in the most apologetic chapter in the Bible (Romans 1). Presuppositionalists are of course right when they point out that the Bible assumes the existence of God on page 1 of Genesis and works from there, but consider the context. Moses was writing to a nation whose fathers had worshipped God for centuries and who had just seen miracle after miracle performed by them. He didn’t have any reason to go into proving the existence of God! When Paul is writing to Gentiles who are the first in their family line to believe in God, however, he takes a few words to explain how they know who He is, and it’s not with Presuppositionalism.

It’s worth pointing out that the man behind the series How to Answer the Fool admitted he himself was converted by Evidentialism. The Moral Standard was the method preferred by one of the great apologeticists of all time, C.S. Lewis. And Classical Apologetics is called that because it used to be the standard apologetics used by the Church’s influential thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas. I hope you found an approach you can use in these posts and urge you to follow through with it with the sources I’ve mentioned so that you can “give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you.”

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My Choice of Apologetics, Part III: The Moral Dimension

The moral argument for God comes in its classic form from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Dr. Sproul liked to trace it back to Immanuel Kant, who rejected the Classical Apologetic view and inserted this one instead. I would recommend Lewis, who didn’t blatantly contradict Romans 1 like Kant did.

Lewis pointed out that humans everywhere have a moral compass. Every culture has values that it calls good and vices that it calls evil. Everyone, in other words, has a conscience with a standard of good and evil. That is, at least as far as everyone else goes. We all expect others to behave with certain propriety towards us even if we don’t feel like reciprocating. Even Hitler felt he had been badly wronged when Himmler tried to desert to the Allies. To feel wronged like that, you need a rule of good and evil.

Lewis agreed that there were variations between what behaviors cultures would accept or not. He did not see this, as some do, as indicating that there is no fundamental moral standard, since if you drill down far enough you eventually get to some common ground. His example was that, in the West, we mandate monogamy, whereas other societies have no problem with polygamy. He couldn’t name a culture, however, where you could sleep with just anyone you wanted without moral censure of some kind.

Many people believe good and evil are just concepts built into the human race as a survival mechanism, but Lewis had answers for that too. He said that when someone wrongs us by accident, we aren’t as angry with them as we are with someone who tries to wrong us on purpose and fails. Didn’t the accidental person do more real damage? Or consider a soldier who falls on a grenade to save his buddies. I don’t think anyone with any heart would consider that anything but a good action, but that person has just terminated all possibility of passing on his genes to the next generation, and that’s what the survival mechanism in animals is all about. They’re so craven about risking the slightest injury that a handful of wolves can put a herd of buffalo, each many times their size and armed with powerful hooves and sharp horns, into panicked flight. When humans desert their comrades, however, we view that as a morally reprehensible action. That’s not the way the survival mechanism works in nature.

Lewis and Kant pointed out that, if this moral standard is to mean anything, there have to be rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad. We know that life tends to do that, but it doesn’t always. Hitler went one country too far when he declared war on us and wound up having to shoot himself, but Stalin and Mao, who actually killed more people, died with their supreme power over Russia and China still theirs to enjoy right up to the end. Evidently, in order for us to say they were wrong when they in the end got what they wanted, there’d have to be some kind of punishment for all the evil they’d done after their deaths.

That would require there to be a judge over the human race. He needs to be omniscient so that he knows what we do, he needs to be omnipotent so he can enforce his judgment, he needs to be incorruptible so he can’t be bribed, and he needs to have created the human race so he has the authority to judge them. In other words, you need the Christian God. Indeed, without a perfect God to set the standard for good and evil, you can’t have a standard at all. No human has the authority or infallibility on earth to lay down perfect rules for how humans should behave. Without God, there’s no reason someone should be a Martin Luther King rather than a Joseph Stalin.

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My Choice of Apologetics, Part II: The Rules of Evidence

Evidential apologetics you’ll find most clearly in the works of Lee Strobel in his “The Case for…” series. I get the impression this is more popular than Classical apologetics even though Dr. Sproul didn’t like it and disavowed the common conception that he was an Evidentialist. Basically, evidentialism looks at all the unlikely circumstances and events that have developed in the history of the universe and the trend that they point towards being deliberate and conclude that a personal, omnipotent God is directing them. AKA the dreaded Intelligent Design. (For the record, Dr. Sproul didn’t like evidentialism because he felt it leaves a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000… chance that all these things are coincidental, whereas he felt Classical apologetics is airtight and irrefutable.)

Evidentialism draws heavily on science. A particular favorite is the fine-tuning of the constants of the universe. If you remember your high school science classes, these constants are the numbers in the equations that you have to memorize (or not, depending on if your teacher was nice enough to give you those with the test questions themselves) because they’re the same each time you run the equations. There’s a gravitational constant of the universe, specific heat for water, the speed of light, and many other things that don’t change. What impresses the evidentialists is how these constants have to be set to an extremely precise value in a relatively very narrow range to support life in the universe. To use an example from Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, if the gravitational constant were to increase just a relatively little, the earth would be compressed too small to maintain any real life, and anything that did live on it would be practically stuck to it because it wouldn’t have the strength to lift itself. The list goes on and on from there.

Taking Chance as our straw man here, as in Classical Apologetics, the evidentialists ask, what’s the likelihood of all these fine-tunings being coincidental? We don’t know of any reason why the universe had to spit out these values, which presumably could have been set at any of an infinite array of numbers, at the precise setting for life, so did Chance rig them all? Well, running all those probabilities, The Case for a Creator points out, leads to a decimal so small it takes more zeroes to write it out than there are atoms in the universe. Many Christian scientists conclude the logical explanation is an omnipotent being intending to make life in the universe set it up that way.

Life itself is another angle of the evidentialists. The cell, the most basic unit of life, is extremely complex. They’re so complex that it would take millions of coincidences to create one just by natural causes. There’s, say, 150 amino acids in the simplest protein times twenty amino acids for each spot in the chain, all having to be exactly right for the protein to function, times hundreds of proteins in each cell times three base pairs of DNA per amino acid times the billions of triplets of base pairs in DNA, all needing to be in the precise order to get even one working cell. Chance must be really lucky to get all those probabilities right (and quick since the product of those all occurring exceeds the number of milliseconds since the Earth began).

Once you get a cell and then higher-level organisms, the problem multiplies because of a concept called irreducible complexity. Most organisms have adaptations that are very complex. They require all the pieces to be there in working order, or the whole thing doesn’t work. The eye and the flagellum motor in bacteria are the examples most often cited. If one of those components is missing, the feature is a useless liability, the kind of thing natural selection would select against. Chance had to get all those mutations right on the first try!

The Cambrian explosion is linked to this concept. The Modern Synthesis of biology maintains that mutations in DNA lead to different characteristics that make organisms over the course of time better suited to their environment, which traits they pass on. The process takes time, presumably a lot of it since you’re going one or two mutations at a time. At the opening of the Cambrian period, though, you have every phylum of animal suddenly coming into existence without intermediate species in a space of time so short it would require mountains of coincidences to produce them. Darwin himself admitted that the fossil record didn’t bear him out, and something the scale of the Cambrian explosion in the big picture far outweighs the rare finds evolutionists later got ahold of, like Archaeopteryx.

Personally, I would add history to the mix of evidence. Is there any more unlikely religion to have spread worldwide than Christianity? Through centuries of onslaughts and oppressions including three Holocausts (massacres by the Assyrians/Babylonians, Romans, and Nazis), the Jews have survived as a nation long enough to produce a Messiah with the possibility remaining that they will one day turn back to Him like Paul predicted. The Church has grown in size and influence against all odds. In its beginning, after being founded by an executed convict followed by uneducated fishermen, it ticked off both the religious leaders of its parent religion and the most powerful empire of the day, but neither could destroy it. No one else has succeeded in stomping it out either despite all the attempts. Basically, every evil empire in history has wanted to wipe out Christianity, and yet it has still grown.

It always seems that some miracle saves it. When barbarians brought down the civilization Christianity had built in the Roman Empire, Clovis experienced a sudden turnaround in battle just in time to bring the Franks to convert. When the Church was languishing in superstition, the printing press came into existence just in time to disseminate the Reformation’s writings. When Suleiman the Magnificent came to conquer a Europe divided by the Reformation, remarkably heavy rains deprived him of his heavy siege guns outside of Vienna. And even when the bad guys win, they can’t take out the Church. Coincidences, all, or intentional, all?

Since I have decided to make my posts shorter, I can’t go into all the evidences for God’s intervention in the universe. In my faith, we believe that everything points to the glory of God since He directs it all to Himself (Romans 11:36). I think you’ll find this paradigm helpful when you drill down into it to try to win over your friends who for all their lives have been told science disproves God’s creation. Please refer to my very first post for a list of the giants of science who have believed in God. We match their appeal to science with a bigger appeal to science.

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My Choice of Apologetics, Part I: Brushing Up on the Classics

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear,” Peter wrote in his first letter (3:15, KJV). Thus, apologetics is a duty for every Christian. Every Christian should know why they believe in God and have answers for those who don’t. I would like to discuss in four posts the four schools of apologetics I am familiar with: Classical, Evidentialist, the Moral Standard, and Presuppositional. It’s impossible to go into the full details of what proves the existence of God (because that would involve discussing everything in the universe), but I’ll direct you to the sources I found on them for your further study. In short, I think all but one of them are Scripturally sound. First, Classical Apologetics.

I encountered Classical apologetics while studying the works of R. C. Sproul, but I believe he said it goes back to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. (He elaborates on his views in Defending Your Faith: An Overview of Classical Apologetics and Not a Chance!) True to Dr. Sproul’s philosophy background, Classical apologetics looks at the question from logic. Starting with the premise that the universe had a beginning, it says that, since the universe had a beginning, it is not self-existent and something self-existent must have created it.

The key concept is creation ex nihilo(out of nothing). An old scientific principle maintains, “Ex nihilo, nihil fit”- “Out of nothing, nothing comes.” Nothing is the absence of any conceivable thing. The minute you go beyond that with “Nothing is such and such,” you’ve just described something, which is by definition not Nothing. So, if you can say, “Nothing is able to create such and such,” that nothing is no longer nothing. Thus, the universe could not have been created from Nothing.

Nor could it create itself. To create itself, it has to be something (because Nothing can’t do anything), so it had to be something before it created itself. So it exists before it exists (i.e., while it does not exist). That’s a contradiction more glaring than anything the critics think they have on the Bible!

The cop-out that everyone knows is that the universe was created by Chance. Basically, Chance is assumed to be this chaotic force of some kind (dare I say magical?) that causes events to happen with no natural cause. I hope you can see the duplicity of atheists who maintain that scientific laws are so established and immovable that a supernatural force never intervenes to overrule them, but Chance can intervene whenever they need it to, to balance the equation.

Dr. Sproul believed in probability and forming expectations even though we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but that’s different from assigning the result to some injection of chaos. The fact that we don’t know why something happened doesn’t mean there’s no natural explanation. Somehow, a culture devoted to rationalism and empiricism has convinced itself that there’s this magical force going around performing miracles. Chance apparently determines which way dice roll, cards are shuffled, or coins are flipped, as if the laws of physics were suddenly suspended just because we can’t predict the outcome. Chance is powerful enough to account for every attribute of every living thing (through mutations that get naturally selected), but still we study laws of biology, which seem to apply so consistently in spite of the fact that it owes so much to random Chance.

In reality, it’s not like those base pairs in the DNA are moving around chaotically. We know that the laws of physics and chemistry operate at the minutest levels. Textbooks say gas is a state of matter where molecules are moving at random, but somehow they never defy scientific laws like Pascal’s or changes in their state of matter when the variables change. When you flip a coin, it goes where all the interactions of the physical forces direct it, not where Chance takes over and directs it based on its whim.

To people not wanting to believe, Chance is the new god. He’s pretty capricious, but at least he’s not going to judge you or demand any commitment. He’s a funny fish. He can create an entire universe and an astonishing variety of life, but he can’t do miracles like suspending a scientific law. He’s omnipotent but hamstrung.

Classical apologists like Dr. Sproul say Chance can’t create anything because it isn’t anything itself. It’s just a figment of our imagination, an omnipotent impersonal force rather than an omnipotent personal being. Is that any more scientific than creationism?

I like Classical apologetics, but I’m not sure it’s for everyone. After all, it relies heavily on philosophy. Your listener would have to comprehend the absoluteness of the term Nothing and reject the idea of Chance as a force that impacts things, which is practically second nature to most of us. I found it tricky to put all the references in this post to Nothing, something, Chance, existence, etc. into phraseology I thought would make sense to someone who hasn’t listened through Dr. Sproul’s lecture series, so I think a better approach to the current culture is my next topic: Evidentialism.

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The Critiques of Calvinism, Part IV: Putting the L in TULIP

I originally intended only three posts on Calvinism, but one of my readers requested a post specifically about Limited Atonement, which is what really irks the Arminians and even some fellow Calvinists. First we have to define our terminology. Limited Atonement, the L in the famous Calvinist TULIP, maintains that, while Christ’s death on the Cross was perfect enough to cover every sin, it really covers and was intended only to cover the sins of the Elect.

Arminians claim that they believe that Christ died to cover every sin. In fact, I remember a discussion with one who posited that, once in everybody’s life, God presents them with the Gospel in some particularly clear way and that your eternal destiny is determined by what you decide at that moment. I would have loved to see his Scriptural reference to that.

The fact is, though, no one can believe in an absolutely unlimited atonement and remain Scriptural very long. If Christ truly lived and died for everyone, then everyone’s forgiven and righteous in God’s sight and belongs in Heaven. That means Hitler and Stalin are enjoying the same blessedness as Peter and Paul. That means that the Pharisees who committed the Unpardonable Sin are going to break bread with Jesus at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. We all know, or at least we all should know, that’s completely fallacious. After all, why should we warn people about Hell if no one has the slightest chance of going there?

Well, most Arminians back-peddle here and say, “Jesus died to cover every sin, except unbelief.” That’s kind of a real step backwards because unbelief is the fundamental sin. Jesus said that the people who shrugged Him off in Capernaum were going to receive worse punishment than the men of Sodom, who tried to heinously violate the then-sacrosanct law of hospitality by gang-raping angels and got wiped off the map for it! When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were doing so because they refused to believe God’s promises, goodness, and wisdom in placing a limit on them. Given that unbelief is at the root of every sin, if Jesus didn’t die to cover it, one wonders what He did die to cover.

At any rate, at this point the Calvinist rejoins, “So you concede the atonement was limited in some way. Now we’re just trying to demarcate the boundaries.” Jesus has already done that for us, however. He said, “I lay down My life for the sheep,” not, “I lay down My life for the sheep and the goats” (John 10:15, KJV). That the sheep here means the Elect is clear from His continuation that, “Ye believe not because ye are not of my sheep” (v. 26). In other words, if you don’t believe, Christ didn’t die for you. (Note also the order here. He says, “You don’t believe because you’re not of the sheep,” not, “You’re not of the sheep because you don’t believe.”) And in John 17:9, as Jesus is pouring out His soul to the Father before His death, He specifically says He doesn’t have the world on His mind, but only the Elect.

Arminians believe that God does 99% and they do 1%, but it’s what I call a “Montgomery” 99%. After a division of British paratroopers was all but wiped out at Arnhem, Field Marshal Montgomery, typically, claimed that Operation Market-Garden was 90% successful. After all, it had taken 90% of the territory that the plan had called for. The problem was, the 10% not taken was the Rhine bridge, which was the whole point of the operation! In much the same way, God can do everything He possibly can with all the love and grace that’s in Him, but unless that person chooses Him, all of Christ’s efforts are for naught. In Arminian theory, God could have made His Son a curse and a public spectacle to no purpose with everyone rejecting His offer. Or, put another way, Arminians believe that they go to Heaven because they did something the other fellow didn’t. That sounds like salvation by a work, if not salvation by works with an S. Getting salvation by choosing Christ is still getting salvation by doing something.

I will say I don’t think Arminians believe in their theology because they’re trying to rob God of some of His glory in salvation (they just do). Instead, they have the otherwise laudable intention of upholding the honor of God and His justice. The problem is that they start from a false assumption. They believe that, in order for God to be just, He has to love everyone equally. This is imposing a human standard on Scripture, which says, “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor” (Romans 9:21, KJV), and, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (v. 13). Yes, it also says, “For there is no partiality with God,” in Romans 2:11, but this is in the context of God’s judicial standard and process, from which no one is exempt. The person who said that God shows no partiality, St. Paul, would most readily affirm that for two millennia there was a vast inequality in God’s treatment of the world. He didn’t give His written Law, prophets, priests, or anointed kings to every nation, but only to Israel. He lovingly saved a few Gentiles through Israel’s witness, but the psalmist made plain about God’s dealings with Israel that, “He hath not dealt so with any nation, and as for His judgments, they have not known them” (Psalm 147:20, KJV). As I said before, God owes no one grace, so we can’t say He’s unjust if He gives it to some and not to others. What’s owed to someone is justice. The beautiful thing about gifts is that they don’t have to be given; they’re given voluntarily from love, not necessitated by justice. Therefore, God can be just without counting His Son’s death towards everyone’s sin equally.

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The Critiques of Calvinism, Part III: Oh, the Injustice of It All!

So I’ve shown that Calvinism accords with the human experience and leads to good human fruit. But there’s still the unresolved question of if God is unjust to predestine people to Hell. There’s really no logical way out of the belief that God predestines people to Hell if you’re a Calvinist. If you’re in Heaven because He picked you, what does that mean but that He didn’t pick the other person?

Any Arminian worth his salt finds that positively unjust. John Wesley said that believing that makes God worse than the Devil. Well, whether we like it or not, that is what Scripture says. Jesus explained, “But there are some of you that believe not. Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (John 6:64-65). In other words, My people come to Me because My Father does something for them that He doesn’t do for others. Or Paul: “Therefore hath He mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will, He hardeneth” (Romans 9:18, KJV). What about Peter saying of nonbelievers, that they “stumble at the word, being disobedient, whereunto also they were appointed” (I Peter 2:8, KJV)?

I think I can lessen the sting a bit. I think what most people have a problem with is supralapsarianism, the branch of Calvinism that maintains that God picks out the people He wants to send to Hell and then ordains the Fall to bring that about. That’s what turned Arminius himself off from Calvinism. I agree that that is unfathomably cruel. I’ll even admit that I think John Wesley was right insofar as supralapsarianism goes.

I subscribe to sublapsarianism, which holds that God decides to permit the Fall and then simply chooses to do justice upon some people rather than show mercy. Justice is about giving people what they deserve for their actions, so I don’t see how logically we can say God decides what is just to do to a person before He decides what they’re going to do.

But is it then unjust to decide not to save some? Clearly Hell is what they deserve, else God wouldn’t send anybody there at all since then He would be unjust. But if we say that grace is undeserved favor, we can’t then complain if He doesn’t show it to some because it was undeserved in the first place. We can’t have it both ways that grace is an amazing gift but that God owes it to everyone. Once something is owed, Paul reminds us, it’s not a gift, but rather wages. I don’t know exactly how many of the great Calvinists were sublapsarian, but I maintain that it is more Scriptural and logical, besides being less offensive to our sensibilities.

Besides, God’s sovereignty in the area of sin is really the only way out of an apparent contradiction in the story of David’s census. II Samuel 24:1 says God “incited” David (ESV) when we know God tempts no one, and then, to add to the confusion, I Chronicles 21:1 says Satan “incited” David (ESV). Then God holds David accountable and punishes him severely for something He incited him to do! So, how can God and Satan both be responsible for something God doesn’t do, something in fact that He was willing to kill 70,000 people over? The only way I can see out of this is to take the Calvinist position. We say that God, in His justice and wisdom, decided that the time had come for David to number the people and let Satan, who was of course more than ready to oblige, tempt David, whose weak human nature caved in to the temptation. That same kind of scenario is described in more explicit detail in I Kings 22 when a lying spirit volunteers to deceive Ahab’s prophets and gets God’s permission to do so. The census was ultimately God’s idea, but the free agents who followed their natures are held fully accountable in His justice.

(In case you think God was overreacting in sending a plague over a census, I have a theory. Samuel explains that He was angry with Israel. My guess is that, after they had conquered their mighty empire, the Israelites were becoming puffed up and feeling self-sufficient, so he let David give that pride a visible manifestation throughout Israel before punishing them.)

By now, I hope you’ll see that our infamous worldview is not a warped and self-serving distortion of Scripture. It accords with Scripture, reason, and the human experience. It doesn’t lead to disobedience of God’s commands to let our light shine before men, and it doesn’t make Him evil (if it’s worked out correctly). And who can really object to a worldview whose rallying cry is, “To God alone be the glory!”

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The Critiques of Calvinism, Part II: By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

Thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and others’ slanderous writings, people have a very definite image of a Calvinist. He’s an up-tight, self-righteous bigot (doubtless a hypocrite to boot) who believes that he is going to Heaven because he’s so good while everybody else is going to Hell. He’s basically a Pharisee who calls the multitude accursed and doesn’t want to do anything to help them because he knows nothing he will do will ultimately make a difference.

A common critique we Calvinists get is, “Why should we do the things God told us to- i.e., good works, evangelism, prayer, etc.- if we don’t believe it’s going to make any difference?” Well, many of you know Anne Hutchinson was kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the Puritans for saying just that. It’s called antinomianism- the belief that we don’t have to live by the Law because we’re saved anyway.

Well, evidently the Apostle Paul had this come up too. He asked rhetorically, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” and answered, “God forbid! How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?” (Romans 6:1-2, KJV). It’s a paradox of Reformed theology that we are not saved by works but that we are not saved without works. The resolution is that, if God has changed your heart such that you love Him and believe in Him, you’re going to want to do good works. He’ll be recreating you as a good tree that bears good fruit. As a child of God, you’ll want to resemble Him and emulate your father. Put another way, if you don’t want to follow the Law because you think you’re saved anyway, you probably aren’t saved in the first place. The fact that Anne Hutchinson was expelled for preaching antinomianism should show you that Calvinists take doing good works very seriously.

As far as evangelism goes, why should we go out and preach if people are going to Heaven whether we proclaim the Good News to them or not? The Westminster Confession explains this brilliantly when it deals with Providence in Chapter 5. It states that, while everything goes according to God’s plan as the primary cause, “He ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes.” In other words, God has picked people out to save, and our evangelizing is the means He’s chosen to bring it about.

One thing I’ve learned about God is that He loves to delegate. Can He save people without us preaching? Of course! But, then, did He need the widow of Zarephath and her oil to feed Elijah? He could have kept feeding Elijah through the ravens or made the cakes appear through an angel like He did later. Instead, He wanted to involve another person in the process so He could save her soul.

The Great Commission is God’s love and wisdom in action since it’s a win-win-win situation. The first Christian gets the joy of sharing the Gospel and the eternal reward that comes from it, the convert gets saved from eternal ruination, and God gets the glory from both. I’ve heard of at least one group of so-called Calvinists that don’t do evangelism because they don’t care about others, but that’s overwhelmingly not the predominant Calvinist attitude.

Most of us are deeply committed to evangelism. George Whitefield, one of the greatest evangelists in history, was a Calvinist, as was Jonathan Edwards. I know you’re thinking now, “Jonathan Edwards. Ugh. ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’- bad!” but consider this: He was out taking the Gospel to Native Americans, whom his fellow colonists regarded as subhuman and targets for exploitation. That’s how great his commitment to evangelism was. William Carey, who metaphorically wrote the book on modern mission work, was a Calvinist. The Calvinist David Livingstone was all but crippled by a lion attack during his far-flung travels to preach the Gospel to Africans, but he didn’t let that keep him from evangelism.

And prayer. I love the way the late Dr. R. C. Sproul explained this. People want to know if prayer is any use from a Calvinist point of view, or, as they put it, can it actually change God’s mind. Dr. Sproul asked them, “What exactly do you think you’re going to tell God that He hasn’t considered already?” So, clearly there’s no way your prayers are going to dissuade or persuade God from His plan. But there are those secondary causes at work again. He wants you to pray because that’s the way He wants to work out His plan. That’s how James can say, “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (5:16) while Samuel affirms, “And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent (that is, change His mind), for He is not a man that He should repent” (I Samuel 15:29, KJV).

This next one I’m not sure why I’m bothering with because I have never disabused an Arminian of this despite it being an outright falsehood. I’m just being thorough here. Every Arminian I’ve talked to believes that Calvinists believe that God chose them because they were more righteous than others, which Arminians at least claim they think is unscriptural. Well, it is unscriptural. It is also uncalvinist. When we say God is absolutely sovereign in His election, we mean He doesn’t owe us a thing. With Paul we ask, “What then? Are we better than they?” (Romans 3:9, KJV) and answer that we “were by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Ephesians 2:3, KJV). When we say everybody is born into a state of non posse non peccare, we’re including ourselves.

We really don’t know why God chose us, but if anybody believes God chooses them on the basis of their righteousness, it’s Arminians! I’m thinking of the famous dispute over what exactly is going on when Paul says, “For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestine…” (Romans 8:29, KJV). As everyone knows, Calvinists say “foreknew” means, “loved beforehand,” and Arminians say “foreknew” means, “foresaw their choice of Him.”

I’ll make the obligatory Calvinist explanations in passing that proginosko refers more readily to a relationship (as the word “know” is frequently used in the Old Testament) than to knowledge of facts and that it is translated, “foreordained” in I Peter 1:20. What I’m really interested in here is the Arminian explanation. It says, “God picks me because He foresees that I will choose Him.” Or, perhaps it can be phrased this way: “God picks me because He knows I’ll do something righteous that this other fellow won’t.” Well, we all know that’s unscriptural. It flies in the face of the Apostle John’s explanation that, “We love Him because He first loved us” (I John 4:19, KJV). It even more blatantly contradicts Jesus’ words that, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” (John 15:16, KJV).

So how accurate is the caricature of a Puritan that’s been part of American culture for two centuries? I hope you can see that Calvinism isn’t a hindrance to evangelism and a help to self-righteousness. If a Calvinist grows lax in missions or thinks God owes him his salvation (and I’m sure that does happen), it’s a sign that their Calvinism is defective.

Next blog post: the obligatory theodicy (vindication of God’s righteousness).

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The Critiques of Calvinism, Part I: What Do We Really Believe?

Calvinism’s a dirty word to most people. It conjures images of self-righteousness, snobbery, and vicious hypocrisy. Thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Calvinistic Puritans have become the bad guys of early American history; certainly their descendants have moved as far away from their worldview as they can. I save revealing my theological convictions for once people have gotten to know me better. Nevertheless, I’ve had a lot of theological interaction with Arminians, so I will now give my reasoned responses to their critiques after a few years’ more reading and reflection. This week’s blog post will explain how what you believe Calvinism teaches is probably wrong.

It’s important in debates to define terms, especially when emotions and preconceived notions are running high. So here are my terms: Calvinism is a worldview that holds God to be sovereign in everything, with particular emphasis on the area of salvation. Arminianism holds that a person’s eternal destiny is ultimately determined by the individual’s free choice. I don’t think Arminianism is that misunderstood, but I assure you Calvinism is.

My father summed it up as, “The popular caricature of Calvinism is that on Judgment Day people are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into Heaven while others who are begging to get in will be shut out.” In other words, people believe Calvinism teaches that some people who want to go to Heaven can’t because they’re not on the list while others who don’t care about Heaven get in just because they are. To Arminians, this is the ultimate injustice since it ignores the person’s free will.

I can categorically state that is not what Calvinism teaches. People wind up where they want to. Well, of course, people who go to Hell don’t want that, but they certainly don’t want Heaven either. The last thing they want to do is praise God forever, which isn’t surprising because they didn’t do it while they were here on earth. Conversely, God doesn’t bring people into Heaven who don’t want to praise Him. The whole point of Heaven is fellowship with God, and He is seeking those who want to worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:23), not people who couldn’t care less about Him.

Calvinism teaches that a person must be in one of three moral states. In an America that’s all about individualism (you vote, you comment, you like, you post, you, you, you…), it’s pretty dangerous to deny free will, but here goes. Calvinism teaches that everyone starts with an inherently sinful nature, one, in fact, that cannot help but sin. I would like to point out for those who think that Calvinism was a relatively recent innovation by one grumpy Reformer that the technical term for this state, non posse non peccare (Latin for “not able not to sin”), comes from no less than St. Augustine. His position was deemed orthodox by the Council of Carthage in the early fifth century when the Church had to choose between him and Pelagius, who taught absolute freedom of the will. Calvinism teaches that when God saves a person, He gives them a new nature that can do good (posse peccare et non peccare), and He finishes in eternity with a nature that cannot sin (non posse peccare).

Do people have free will? Sure, in the sense that they’re not an automaton God winds up and pushes where He wants to go, but the will is bound to the nature. It follows its inclinations and preferences. “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good, and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil. For of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaketh” (Luke 6:45, KJV). Jesus also said, “Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit” (Matthew 7:17-18, KJV). The tree doesn’t bear just any kind of fruit; it necessarily brings forth the type of fruit it naturally produces (non posse non peccare and non posse peccare, in other words). When people tout humanity’s free will, are they considering Jesus’ words, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, whosoever commiteth sin is the servant of sin” (John 8:34, KJV)? Not very free sounding, I’m sure you’ll agree. Then you can add His explanation for the source of sin, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19, KJV). If we equate heart with will, we have a will enslaved to sin.

Basically, your free will does what it wants to. That’s why you do everything you do- because you want to. You may not look forward to it or think it pleasant, but in the end you do it because you expect some benefit that will outweigh the cost. Can you think of anything you’ve decided to do that you can’t drill down and find an underlying desire for? Alcoholics know that drinking too much is bad for them, but they think it’s worth the bad effects to get the feeling of being drunk. Even if you do something you don’t like for someone else, you’re doing it because you want to be nice to them. Sometimes you make a decision you don’t like just because it’s the least bad choice, but even then you want to cut your losses. Put another way, if you did something you totally did not want to do, something you don’t see any benefit in whatsoever and that you think is actually completely bad for you, you’re being extremely irrational! I agree with those who say about a sin, “It’s only natural”- for an evil creature! How much easier is it to develop a bad habit than a good one? And even when we do in fact do something good, Paul says it wasn’t our idea: “For it is God which worketh in you, both to will, and to do, of His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13, KJV).

I’m going to get really bold here and say that Arminians, when they think they can make a good choice before God changes their nature, are claiming an ability that even God doesn’t possess. Why does the Bible say God cannot lie or be tempted? Isn’t He free to lie if He wants to? Is someone going to stop Him? I think what God’s saying is that His nature is so pure and holy that there’s not one iota of a chance that He would even consider doing such things. Even He cannot go against His own nature (which is actually a very good thing).

Most people think humans are naturally good or at least capable of goodness. After all, even atheists love those who love them. Certainly, everyone does things that are outwardly good. Even Hitler loved his dog Blondi (until, that is, he needed a subject to test the poison he was about to commit suicide with). But, according to Jesus, that doesn’t make us good. In Matthew 7:11, He says that parents who give good things to their children are still evil. Martin Luther drove himself half-mad when he realized what Jesus was getting at. Coming from a background as a most promising law student, he said that, since Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God with all of our being, there’s our greatest obligation, and do we ever do that? No! Everything we do falls short of that standard, and thus everything we do is somewhat sinful. How can nonbelievers, who by definition have no faith, do a good work in God’s sight when Paul says, “For whatsoever is not of faith is sin”? (Romans 14:23, KJV). People can do outwardly good things because they know it’s good for them to do so, but they don’t do it out of love for God and thus fail to live up to what they were designed for.

So much for free will. Next blog will examine the fruits of Calvinism. After all, that’s ultimately how you must judge any doctrine.

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What Love Is… and Is Not

The Bible is full of commands to love. The two greatest commandments, and thus our two greatest obligations, are to love God and to love others. In I Corinthians 13, Paul basically says that no good deed is worth anything if it’s not done in love. It seems the world agrees with us in this at least, to judge by the popular songs calling for love and the crowds chanting, “Love trumps hate.” Are they not just restating Paul’s command to “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21, KJV)? I think you’ll find that, examining Biblical love, the world’s version is actually a warped imitation of it.

The love that the Bible commands us to show is actually simply defined if complex in practice. Basically it wants the best for the object of its love, even if it involves sacrifice on the part of the lover. C.S. Lewis brilliantly explained how we are to love our enemies even when they’ve grievously offended us by looking at how he loved himself. He said that he angered himself at himself with his sins, but he never stopped wanting what was best for himself.

So what does that look like in practice? Love helps others to do things we can and they can’t (Galatians 6:2). It gives of its time and resources to those who are in need, even if those in need are the kind the world despises (James 1:27; Romans 12:16). It is hospitable (I Peter 4:9), though what constitutes hospitality might vary from occasion to occasion. In its speech, love is tactful, respectful, and edifying (I Corinthians 13:4-5; Colossians 4:6). You tell people in a considerate way what they need to know to build them up, not what you want to tell them to tear them or others down, as my pastor told me. It tries not to offend if at all possible and doesn’t impose conformity with its opinion upon others (Romans 14). It listens and tries to empathize with a person who has really good news or really bad news (Romans 12:15). Love is patient and overlooks little insults and injuries; it doesn’t like to be angry and tries to think the best of people (Proverbs 19:11; I Corinthians 13:5- see my prior post on the Judgment of Charity). It readily forgives and moves forward with the relationship without holding things over people (Ephesians 4:32). It doesn’t calculate what it can get or expect repayment (I Corinthians 13:5; Luke 6:35).

Now, so far, I’ve listed the virtues of love that only the most cantankerous, selfish people would object to. We all know we don’t live up to those standards, but I expect most of you would agree that they are all good. Well, here’s the one that people stumble over: while quick to forgive, love is also willing to rebuke (Matthew 18:15).

Here’s where the world parts company with love. Its version of love is apparently to make the other person happy at any price, and rebukes don’t make people happy, so they simply can’t be done. When a Christian says or does something in rebuke of another, you can see what the world’s love is truly like. The same people who tout, “Love trumps hate,” turn on the Internet or in the mail into the most hateful trolls, spewing death threats and maledictions against the Christian and their loved ones. They live out James’s observation that, “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (3:10, KJV). They seem to want to be like the Byronic heroes who pervade our action movies who feel free to sink to the villain’s level as long as the villain does it first.

But is it really loving to allow someone to stay in gross sin just because it makes them happy? Love wants the other person to be happy, yes, but it wants a deeper, more fulfilling joy for the person. Let’s say you give vodka to an alcoholic. Now, they’re probably going to be happy with you, but you haven’t done what’s best for them. You’ve contributed to them living a life of wasted potential probably ending in an early grave (or someone else’s early grave if they go driving after drinking it). Whom are you really loving? I posit that you’re actually loving yourself when you put your cravings for their approval above their own well-being.

When you add God’s ineluctable judgment on sin into the equation, the stakes get infinitely higher. Rather than trying to keep an alcoholic from a simple hangover, you’re trying to save someone from an eternity of abject misery. How is it loving to let them go merrily off to Hell rather than risk them becoming angry with you? By the Biblical definition of seeking what’s best for them, you’ve failed to love them dismally.

Now, I grant that often the rebuking is not done in a loving way. This gives the world ammunition to use against Christians, even if they’d resent rebukes all the same. At any rate, there’s really no call for hateful rebukes from positions of moral superiority. The process Jesus prescribes in Matthew 18 makes it clear that we’re to keep this as private as possible. Even if it goes so far that the person must be put out of the Church, love is still the guiding principle, as Paul explains in I Corinthians 5. Most of all, the Church is to love God such that it doesn’t let it appear that He condones gross sin, then it is to love its members and remove the temptation from them. But, in the end, it also excommunicates the person so they’ll miss the benefits of Church and come to repentance. At no time is the goal of excommunication to destroy the person, contrary to the papacy’s practice during the Reformation. In II Corinthians 2, after the man who was guilty of incest repented, Paul tells them to receive him back into the fold.

In the New Testament, when Jesus and the Apostles issue rebukes in the form of invectives, it’s almost always against someone actively interfering with another’s salvation- i.e., false teachers and deceivers- and not, say, the sexually immoral. In fact, when Jesus deals with an adulterous woman in John 8, a loose Samaritan woman in John 4, and the sinful woman in Luke 7, He astounds everyone with His courtesy to them. Likewise, when Paul presents the Gospel to the Athenians, even though they’ve greatly distressed him with their idolatry, he observes the rhetorical format and devices they’d expect, compliments them on their zeal, and builds common ground by citing the poets they’ve all read. What Jesus and Paul don’t compromise in their attempts to reach out to people, however, is the command, “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11, KJV).

Also, we can easily rebuke too much. There are plenty of people who will correct anything, be it a slip of etiquette, a spelling/grammar mistake, or something more serious. This is actually a bad idea for a few reasons. For one thing, you’ll make people uncomfortable and not want to be around you. For another, it’s counterproductive since it exhausts what I call your “critical capital.” If people come to see you as someone who criticizes everything, your opinion’s not going to count for as much when someone does something that actually does need criticizing. We all know the story of the little boy who cried wolf. Besides, it’s not good for you. I think constant criticism is what Jesus has in mind when He says, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1-2, KJV). In other words, if we want God to be patient with us, we should be patient with other.

I think we as a society have made compassion into an idol, and an idol made out of compassion is still an idol. In the name of compassion, we turn blind eyes to things God has forbidden to keep ourselves out of hot water and others happy. We thus love ourselves above Him. That kind of compassion is not pleasing in His sight. It’s not true Biblical love, and it’s not good for anyone involved.