“We Had to Destroy That Village to Save It”
Having examined the faulty Calvinistic definition of “election,” we now turn our attention to Calvinism’s related argument about Depravity—the idea that all men are depraved in their choice, and by nature intend to sin unrelentingly. In fact, this underlying assumption about man by the Calvinist makes divine, “irresistible” election necessary, since man cannot even meet he condition of having a will of his own that can receive Christ.
As for Depravity, then, it is important that the passages in the New Testament allegedly claiming man’s inability to believe [e.g., “ye cannot hear my word” (Jn. 8:43)] show a context where men have set their minds determinedly away from Christ in a way not generally described of every unbeliever. We saw this at the end of the last chapter, especially in footnote 53, regarding dunamai in Greek verses usually translated “can.” [The reader is strongly recommended to read this footnote if he has not done so (see p. 187)]. Now recalling our final point in the main text in the last chapter, remember that the specific audience which Christ addressed in John 8 was to would-be Christ killers to whom Jesus said, ‘ye seek to kill me…ye cannot hear my word.‘ This was not Christ’s attitude toward the average unbeliever during His ministry. Jesus didn’t speak parables to the common people who “heard him gladly” (Mk. 12:37) and then end such sermons by saying they wanted to kill him and could not believe. Nor did He treat them as if they had no will. Rather, he said to them, ‘He that has ears to hear, let him hear‘ (Mk. 4:9; cp. Mk. 4:23). Thus God does not describe every unbeliever as those men of John 8, who were doubtless like the stubborn men of Zechariah 7:9-13:
9Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother: 10And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart. 11But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. 12Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets: therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of hosts. 13Therefore it is come to pass, that as he cried, and they would not hear; so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the Lord of hosts:
A natural reading of this passage shows that man’s reprobation begins with man himself. God specifically says that the men of Zechariah 7 have not hearkened to do what He cried out for them to do. To what position must we contort Christian theology, then, to agree with the Calvinist that verse 11 means the opposite view, i.e., that God does not want these people to hearken to Him because He has ordained it? Again, notice the order of rebellion, “they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone…Therefore came a great wrath from the Lord.” Note how these people were virulent in their rebellion before the Lord brought forth His wrath. They are described as having turned the shoulder and having shut down the eye gate and ear gate so they didn’t have to see or hear the truth. I would encourage readers to take the time to stand up and imitate the kind of body language described of these stubborn men of Zechariah 7:11. One will find that the shoulders actually begin turning before the feet can change position to walk away. Thus, the description is one where men have gotten so accustomed to not wanting to hear God’s Word that their spiritual body language has become one of instinctual rejection. They have seared their consciences in regard to the truth of Christ. Thus they don’t even want to see the message of the Lord mouthed. Clearly, this is not how the Bible has described every unbeliever who rejected God’s Word upon hearing it. The unbelieving Gentiles in Acts 13 who heard Paul preach at Antioch made an express commitment to hear him again during the next Sabbath. They had become dissatisfied with their spiritual life and were determining to believe the truth. The following week many believed. In contrast to these men at Antioch, the Athenians who heard Paul preach about salvation on Mars’s Hill (Acts 17) can arguably (according to the Greek Interlinear text) be compartmentalized into two groups-those who believed, and those who stopped up their ears while turning their shoulders away. Two groups, we note, because Luke says that some of them “mocked and (Gr. kai, possibly yet), said, ‘We will hear you again on this matter.’ ” A literal picture of unbelievers stopping up their ears is described in Acts 7, in which many of the crowd rushed upon Stephen and killed him. Those who wanted to kill Christ in John 8 also stopped up their ears (metaphorically speaking). In fact, they had been in the habit of accusing him-”Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?” (Jn. 8:48). Again, this was not the average response of those unbelievers among the general public whom the Bible says “heard him gladly” (though sadly, we note, but for a time).
The point here is that not all men respond the way that Calvinistic theology says they uncontrollably must. Calvinism makes the further claim that God foreordains Satan’s blinding activity upon such unbelievers. But if that is so, why does the Bible tell us that Satan is the god of this world? For God to sovereignly ordain that a man shall be subject to the evidence of Himself in the creation, but merely for the express purpose that Satan be sovereignly directed by God to blind that man to that very evidence, is to argue for a God that is monstrous and is Himself the ruler of this world. Simply put, such a view is neither biblical nor logical. Granted, we suspect how the Calvinist will respond to our appeal for logic; as A.W. Pink says:
Once more, we say, it is not for us to reason about the Gospel; it is our business to preach it.xlii
Different Degrees of Sinfulness
Moreover, if it is true that men intend to sin uncontrollably (as Calvinism implicitly suggests), then all men ought to be intending to sin to the greatest degree possible, and therefore should be judged equally guilty in the afterlife. That nations, however, receive different degrees of punishment in the afterlife is proof that all men in their intentions do not sin equally. Yet the Calvinistic reply that God is restraining some, while allowing others to sin relatively unhindered, explains nothing about why all men are not judged equally guilty in the afterlife. Indeed, to go the heart of the matter, how is the Calvinistic idea of God’s common grace a credit to man? For it is the mindset and heartset which concern God. Christ implied this fact in the Sermon on the Mount, when he said that if a man was given to lust, though he have no opportunity to engage it, he was nevertheless guilty before God (i.e., by reason of his intention). So if the Calvinist is right about all men being utterly depraved apart from the common grace of God, why are not all judged as equally guilty by reason of their intentions? Instead, Christ showed that one people could have a lesser sinful intention than another people. Christ points out this fact when discussing the judgment of certain cities, i.e., that the reason some unbelieving cities would receive a lesser condemnation than others in the coming judgment is because they would have responded positively had they been given the latter’s circumstances. For example, in Matthew 11:21-23 Christ claims that Tyre and Sidon would have repented in sackcloth and ashes a long time ago if they had seen the same miracles as those done in Bethsaida and Chorazin. He also says that Sodom would have remained to the present day had it seen the miracles done in Capernaum. This prompts Christ to pronounce a special “Woe!” upon these hard-hearted cities of His generation, the kind of which was not pronounced upon Tyre, Sidon, or Sodom. In another instance Christ said that the Queen of the South who heard Solomon, and the men of Nineveh who heard Jonah, would rise up and condemn the generation of Christ’s unbelieving listeners, since these former ancients had repented at the teaching and preaching of Solomon and Jonah respectively, both of whom were lesser figures than Christ (Lk. 11:31-32). How, we ask, can these statements be understood regarding the different judgmental outcomes of peoples, if the heartset of all men and women are at all times equally sinful, as Calvinistic theology claims? Again, if God was the sole factor in seeing that the Queen of the South and the men of Nineveh repented, how is that a basis for judgment against Christ’s own generation? Such an explanation defies any normal reading or explanation of the text. Thus, Calvinists fail to see that some men choose to sin where others do not, and that God will make a difference in judgment because of it. This is the biblical explanation of what constitutes the basis of God’s judgment, and it is a reasonable one. Unfortunately, the Calvinist will not accept this explanation. He wants to say that all men have done (or would do) an equal amount of wickedness because their heartsets are the same. But again, this is simply not a position the Bible supports.
Simon the Pharisee
Let us further consider what the Bible says about some people not sinning as much as others. For there is another passage besides those of Matthew 11:21 and Luke 11:31-32 in which an inequality of sinfulness is assumed, and it is the parable Jesus spoke to Simon the Pharisee. As we recall, Jesus is eating at Simon’s house when a woman comes in and washes His feet with her tears. Apparently, it was public knowledge that this woman was a sinner. This probably meant she was a prostitute, for it is unclear in New Testament culture what else besides prostitution would cause others to label her a sinner. Thus, Simon wonders why Jesus, if He were a real prophet, would allow such a woman to touch even His feet. Jesus knows what Simon is thinking and turns the event into a teaching moment:
37And there was a woman in the city who was a sinner; and when she learned that He (Jesus) was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, 38and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume. 39Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a sinner.” 40And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” 41“A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of them will love him more?” 43Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” 44Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. 46You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. 47For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” 48Then He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” (Lk. 7:37-48)
Simon was a rare bird. He was actually a believing Pharisee. This is made plain by Christ symbolizing him as a forgiven debtor. Spiritually speaking he was a debtor of 50 denarii. (A single denarius was one day’s wage, so even 50 denarii was not an inconsiderable sum.) But like so many who find themselves with Pharisaical baggage after their conversion, Simon too is seen judging others without proper understanding. While Christ actually confirms Simon’s belief that this woman was a considerable sinner-10 times, in fact, the sinner that Simon was (presumably, Christ was speaking in general terms), Simon is told that because his debt to God was not as great, so neither will be his gratitude and love. Christ, however, cancels all debts, and so the woman stands with Simon on an equal footing. Because of God’s forgiveness Simon is to realize that the woman he regarded as too unclean to touch Jesus’ feet ought rather to be embraced as a sister. In fact, in terms of Christian service, this would mean that Simon should wash her feet.
Some interpreters have suggested that this parable does not teach an inequality of sinfulness among men, and that Simon’s debt is said to be less because Simon perceived it to be less. Nothing in this parable supports this claim, however. Rather, Christ assumes the very opposite premise when He states that this woman’s sins were many in number. Thus, Jesus confirmed the accuracy of Simon’s comparison in principle, though we hasten to add that Simon, as a legalist, may have thought he was not even 1% of the sinner the woman was! (Perhaps this is why the Bible tells us comparisons are not wise, since everyone tends to think they are less sinful than they really are).
This parable of the Lord, besides whatever other lessons are intended regarding indebtedness, gratitude, and love, also teaches us that all men are not equally in debt regarding their sins. Yes, all men are debtors, all are headed for eternal punishment in hell, and all are in need of a Savior. To put the parable into a modern setting, certainly a boss is not going to call into his office an employee who stole $5,000 from his company and tell him how commendable he is for not having stolen as much as someone else who stole $50,000! Neither one is commendable, but the fact remains that one stole 10 times that of another. (Incidentally, the one who stole $5,000 may have something to boast about to the man who stole $50,000, but not before the boss). The Calvinist will not explain this difference in sinfulness. Perhaps, I should say the Calvinist cannot explain this difference so long as he is unwilling to set his apologetics on something other than a doctrine of depravity, which says that all men have dug themselves to the same level of pig-slop sinfulness because of their inability to choose the good. Rather, it is correct to say that no man can be seen as righteous by reason of the sinfulness that completely covers all men, while also noting that some men have dug themselves deeper into the pig slop of sin than others.
God’s Drawing of Man-What It Is; What It Isn’t
Before we leave the subject of what man can and cannot do, we must consider the word helko in John 6:44, translated “draw.” [This will compliment what we have already seen in footnote #53 regarding what the word “dunamai” means in this verse. (Incidentally, for further information about interpreting John 6:44, see Scripture Index.)] Let us look at verse 44 in the context of its prior verses:
41The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven. 42And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? 43Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, Murmur not among yourselves. 44No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.
The Greek word for draw here is the same word which Christ uses in John 12:32 when He says, “If I be lifted up I will draw all men unto myself.” This word to draw (the intensity of the verb varying, according to context), means to pull; though often Calvinists claim that helko means to drag in all of its occurrences (or at least in those occurrences necessary to affirm their Calvinism). In the New Testament it seems to occur in contexts in which there is a lifting. (I do not mean to suggest, however, that such verticality is necessarily part of helko’s lexical meaning, due at least to its Septuagint use. Nevertheless, it is an interesting observation.) Taking into consideration what we have learned the word “cannot” means in regard to free will persons (again, see footnote #53), let us consider the meaning of John 6:44 and John 12:32. All men have chosen to set their minds upon evil and thus against spiritual things, and therefore they cannot come to Christ. They are unable to come because they are unwilling to come. Again, expressed another way, how can a man come if he is unwilling? God has left the matter of a man’s ultimate response entirely within that man’s own will. If, then, a man is unwilling to respond to God’s outreach, there is no other recourse that can effect his coming, and the matter is over.54 Moreover, a man cannot effect his own atonement. In using the word “cannot” in the last sentence we mean it in the sense of actual (or de facto) inability, not willful inability. This means that man must rely upon God to provide him an atonement for his sin.
Christ gives a description of the Father in John 6:44 to show by what exact means God brings about man’s salvation, i.e., “the Father which hath sent me.” It is the One the Father has sent who will provide the way of salvation for men. It is the Father who will lift men up to a place where, like the thieves on the cross on either side of Jesus, they can gaze (so to speak) upon Christ and decide if they will believe in His work for them. Some men will look upon Christ without any sense of urgency or submission of heart, as did the unrepentant thief. Others will ask for a place in Paradise with Him, as did the repentant thief who cried out for mercy. During the course of these two thieves’ lives, both had allowed their feet to set in the thick ooze of the sludge of their will, so that their faces might always gaze more intently in the direction of evil. The longer they stayed in this position the greater became the sucking power of the mud upon their feet. God, however, through the Sun (Son), turned the mud into dry ground and lifted their feet to a place upon the soil so that they could walk more easily in a new direction if they but chose to do so. But each of these men had to choose for himself what he would do. Notice in John 6:44 that Christ does not say that man cannot come to Him unless the Father makes the man come. Rather, the problem lies in getting the man to a place where he is under more influence to exercise his will to receive Christ. Thus toward this place the Father draws a man, i.e., to the foot of the cross, where he might consider the Savior who died for him55 This kind of resistible drawing agrees with the nature of man’s will as Christ implicitly described that will to Nicodemus in John 3:14-15, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” i.e., so that “whosoever believeth in Him should not perish.” One could choose to look at the serpent, but one did not have to. Thus, Christ’s sacrifice solved the problem of our actual inability and encourages us in the problem of our willful inability. In fact, helko is the Greek word used by the Septuagint translators for the idea of persuasive wooing, found in Song of Solomon 1:4. Arguably, this wooing was done publicly (note the ‘we’) and may have run to and fro between gentleness and stronger exhortation. “Draw (helko) me, we will run after thee.” This use in the Septuagint shows that the contemporary culture of Jesus understood that helko had some latitude of meaning depending on the context. Thus the English pull, not drag, IF only one word were used in translation for helko, works for both passages, i.e., for a maiden asking to be pulled toward her lover so that she might run after him, and the pulling of a net ashore. Thus nowhere must the Bible student take helko to mean the kind of irresistibility that Calvin’s theology demands, that is, as long as the passage in question suggests another meaning. Furthermore, if, say, in a novel one read the word “drag,” in which its meaning was non-literal, i.e., Mom had to drag Jason from bed every morning to go to school, the same author might use the word drag in a literal way in other portions of the same book. Similarly, no conservative Protestant, for example, would take the words of Christ literally in John 6:54, i.e., when Jesus tells His hearers that whoever eats His flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life, even though 5 verses earlier Jesus uses the word eat in a literal sense. Even so, it should be understood that the Father does not drag a man irresistibly in some spiritual sense unless the biblical context demands it, which it never does. Thus, with a verb having some latitude of meaning, one must examine the near and far contexts to determine the meaning that Scripture intends for each of that verb’s given appearances.
The best biblical example of pulling a man all the way to the foot of the cross, at which point man himself must exhibit faith, is probably that of the Jewish people during the exodus narrative. God, pulls (Gr. helko, i.e., woos and admonishes) the children of Israel safely through the first nine plagues toward the goal of delivering them, even as a shepherd might his sheep. But observe that the children of Israel must exercise faith by trusting the Lord’s word regarding the Passover meal, that is, if God is to deliver them from the 10th plague (and ultimately from Egypt). Deliverance will fail them if they do not exercise faith at this point. Even so, a man must exercise faith after God has pulled him toward the cross of Christ.
Now needless to say, we can expect the Calvinist to claim that God dragged the hearts of Israel into a state of regeneration, so that they would observe the Passover. We anticipate this argument from the Calvinist, since he is unwilling to state unqualifyingly that man decides anything on his own. For to admit such a thing would be to threaten his entire Calvinistic paradigm-a paradigm which denies any meaning to human freedom. Consequently, the Calvinist will apply Scripture irrationally (by stating contradictory propositions). The result is that man remains the puppet that he must, in order that God might remain absolutely sovereign. Thus, regarding the present discussion of the Israelites, ‘man’s choice‘ to believe the Lord regarding the Passover and be saved, is redefined by the Calvinist, so that it is neither man’s nor a choice, yet claimed to be both. Even so, such ‘regeneration‘(as defined by the Calvinist, i.e., with a view toward salvation) would beclaimed by Sproul to precede (Sproul, “leads to”) the renewed life, even though it is also claimed to mean ‘rebirth,’ (i.e., life itself). (We must note here that ‘regeneration’ of man’s desire cannot itself be the renewed spiritual life if man must still rush to Christ in order to have that life.) Make no mistake-such irrational arguments are indeed sophisticatedly drawn, and if this were not the case the Church would not continue to struggle with such ‘theology’ after 16 centuries. What the Calvinist has done is this: he has taken helko and insisted that it means “to drag” in verses where the meaning to drag is obvious, i.e., ‘Peter dragged the net ashore,’ then made that meaning of private interpretation (that is, exempted it from lexical controls and other differing contexts in which the word also appears) and then applied that private meaning to every salvific context, while ignoring everything else in those salvific contexts which disproves his theology. Such a method would be like that of a reader of a memoir finding in one place the sentence, “I love horseshoes,” and finding in another place the sentence, “I love my wife,” and, by absolutizing the context about horseshoes, insisting upon the inference that the author was stating that he loves to throw his wife around, preferably upon a stake. Even so, the dragging of a fishnet is not the same as dragging the fishes’ will to a place of change, and the dragging of Jason and certain brethren was the dragging of their bodies, not their wills, unto a place not of their choosing. Nowhere in the Bible is the will of one thing ever dragged irresistibly to a place of change.
Appearance is Everything
Because this method of misapplying contexts (initiated by private interpretations) is something vitally important to note, we will need to examine it at some length before returning to a discussion of helko. For the real strength of Calvinistic argument is redefined definitions which are subtly introduced as something other than redefined definitions. Thus the one exposed to Calvinistic arguments thinks he shares the same meaning of words when conversing with the Calvinist. But in fact the Calvinist is using definitions that are no definitions at all. For example, although early in life we hear phrases like, “That was a good report card,” “That apple pie sure tasted good,” “The orchestra sounded good,” etc., and therefore learn from these experiences the proper and logical definition of the word “good,” the Calvinist uses the word “good” in a very different way to mean the moral quality of whatever happens in history. I am convinced that at least many Calvinists themselves (and remember, I once counted myself among them) are unaware of what they do.
The strength of Calvinism is thus twofold. First, the person encountering Calvinism who has formerly understood the true meaning of words like “good,” has previously built up in his mind an association between the vocal-sound “good” and its correct meaning. But now, in encountering Calvinism, this association of the vocal-sound “good” will be used against him (as will the vocal-sounds of all key terms in theology). For as he now encounters the word “good” as used by the Calvinist, he assumes he knows what the Calvinist is saying, but in fact he assumes incorrectly, because he really has no shared meaning with the Calvinist. Therefore, because of his association of the vocal-sound “good” to the true meaning of “good” in past experiences, he may think he knows what the Calvinist means by the vocal sound “good” when he hears that word, but he is mistaken. For the Calvinist means something entirely different when he uses the vocal-sound “good.” In brief, the Calvinist and the non-Calvinist do not mean the same thing by the vocal sound “good,” and therefore they have no shared meaning. Yet it will appear that they share meaning, since they use the same vocal sound.
To give an analogy of this, suppose two brothers grew up eating apples and knew what apples really were, but then years later one of the brothers (having ruined his mind through false philosophy) says to the other, “I ate an apple that has never existed.” The still sensical brother, hearing this, will nevertheless picture an apple in his mind upon hearing his brother’s statement, even though such an “apple,” which the ruined brother proposes, could never be eaten. That is, the vocal-sound “apple” will bring a picture of a real apple to the sensical brother’s mind because of his past associations between the vocal-sound “apple” and its correct meaning. Yet at this point in the brotherly dialogue something else happens. The ruined brother now adds even more confusion to the conversation by reminding his brother about the apples they used to eat when they were kids. Thus it seems to the sensical brother that his ruined brother is talking sense again. Only it doesn’t last long; for the ruined brother soon returns to talking about the apple he ate which never existed. This goes back and forth until the sensical brother doesn’t know what to make of it all.
Now let me offer an actual example of this kind of dialogue to show how absolutely similar Calvinism is to other false religious systems, in this case Buddhism (which de facto treats all terms as having illusory meaning). Recently I tuned into a National Public Radio show called “Fresh Air,” in which I heard hostess Terry Gross say56 to her guest Pico Iyer (a journalist covering the Dalai Lama during the Chinese oppression of the Tibetans) that while she (Gross) understood how the Dalai Lama’s response to oppression, i.e., that “one does not have to be unhappy,” might make sense on some spiritual level, it was difficult to see how it could really intersect with the political realm (i.e., was relevant). Iyer replied by admitting that certainly there was political oppression going on against the Tibetans. But then Iyer immediately added that the Dalai Lama was “not simply handing out placebos,” when he told his people they did not have to be unhappy, because in fact there were “many freedoms” in life, and in whatever circumstances one found himself, one could still “remain with an open heart.”
Observe, then, that Iyer replied to Gross’s question first by a rational statement, conceding Gross’s point that real political oppression did exist against Tibetans. Or at least Iyer appeared to concede Gross’s view with a seeming rational statement. For I contend that Iyer immediately backed off the reality of such oppression by stating that the Dalai Lama was “not handing out placebos” but merely recognizing that there are “many freedoms,” and that in the midst of oppression one can still remain with “an open heart.” But note that to state the matter this way is to state a doublethink. For we ought to contend that the Dalai Lama is handing out placebos, since he advocates a state of mind that does justice neither to the reality of political oppression nor to the emotion of anger that all fair-minded citizens ought to feel against oppression. In other words, his rational appeal is a sham. Indeed, will the Dalai Lama suggest next that such a response would have been appropriate for the Jews in Auschwitz? Yes, what a shame the Germans did not hang up signs in the gas showers to help alleviate the suffering of Jews-”You do not have to be unhappy while you die.” Wisdom will certainly perish with the Dalai Lama. Well, enough of this nonsense. By now we see that the Dalai Lama recognizes no real political oppression against his people despite the appearance that he does. He has, in effect, merely taken the vocal-sound “political oppression” and played a clever trick on a naive journalist by convincing her of his ‘profound’ utterances, so that she in turn can enlighten the Western world about how to handle suffering. Indeed, as every Buddhist knows, one does not have to be unhappy about suffering as long as that suffering takes place in a world of illusion. Iyer, in effect, was merely the Dalai Lama’s mouthpiece, first reminding us of the apples we ate as kids, before promising that we can eat apples that don’t exist; and so these statements, when taken together, mean that we can eat “rotten apples” with “worms” in them and at the same time not be unhappy, since such “apples” and “worms” have existence only as vocal sounds, not real things. Technically in fact, and as already observed, such a statement about eating non-existent things is meaningless in all its grammar, since predicates and subjects cannot engage non-existent things. Thus the trick in Buddhism, as in Calvinism, is to speak the irrational, but claim it is rational.
So then, let me ask a question of my readers: How is the Calvinist response to the problem of evil any different than the Dalai Lama’s? As my readers ultimately move into the last chapter of this book (The Problem of Evil) we will see a Calvinist who appears to admit with rational sounding statements that there is real oppression and evil in the world, but will then quickly add the statement that evil has no “ontological being.” Thus in one breath (so to speak) he will tell us that evil exists, yet in a way in which it has no being! And, of course, this Evangelical will deny handing out placebos to us.
Second, and this point is actually similar to the first, Calvinism’s irrational ‘theology’ redefines reality in a seductive way so that, regardless of circumstances, a kind of bliss reigns; or at least we are told we can assume this, since even attacks done to us as believers is claimed to be done for us, regardless of their origin. Indeed, if God (according to the Calvinist) creates the very thoughts and intents of all souls, how can anything be truly against the believer even if the activity is from the Enemy? Thus, the Enemy is merely the ‘Enemy,’ i.e., a word which for the Calvinist merely reflects another kind of God’s construct that is working itself out in the world and for ‘our good,’ which, as my astute readers will now see, is actually neither ours nor good.
Various Forms of Helko
Now I confess I have gone somewhat far afield in these observations, though, of course, they are relevant in showing the method Calvinists use to overthrow the meanings of key words, like helko. But now let us compare some of the various words which are translated draw, drew, and dragged in the New Testament, realizing that basically the only quid pro quo word that works in English translation in all instances is “to pull,” not “to drag.” Now not in view in our discussion here is the word draw used in John 2:8 and John 4:7, 11, and 15, which specifically relates to the drawing of water, as from a well, or as in the bailing of a ship’s hold (the etymology for this particular word translated draw actually comes from a word meaning a ship’s hold ). There are, then, three remaining Greek words to consider. Two of these are commonly translated as draw, drew or dragged and are more similar in meaning to each other than to the third. These two are exchanged in at least one example in the New Testament where Peter is said to have drawn his sword: Matthew and Mark choose a word for draw whose root (Gr. spao), means to draw, or draw out,and which seems to emphasize the drawing out of Peter’s sword. John chooses a word for draw (Gr., helko, meaning to draw, to pull) which happens to occur in a context of lifting, thus Peter drew out (pulled out) his sword in an upward motion to strike Malchus’s ear. (Observe that we do not think of a sword being dragged out, but pulled out.) Interestingly enough, the word that John uses for the drawing of Peter’s sword is the same word for draw in John 12:32, where Jesus says that if He is lifted up He will draw all men unto Himself, i.e., in this case, up to Himself. The occurrences of helko in a context of vertical lift appear to be found in all of the other New Testament passages in which helko appears. Thus, the disciples could not pull the net of 153 fish (up) into their boat, Peter pulls this same net of fish to shore (and thus presumably up onto the shore so that it was out of the water), and Paul and Barnabas were pulled by certain angry Philippi merchants from Lydia’s house in Thyatira (up) to the Philippian marketplace (the latter, I believe, being of a higher geographical elevation). Again, though, this observation of helko’s vertical aspect does not include the history of other lexical control groups, such as the Septuagint. Nevertheless, there does appear to be the suggestion of verticality in all of the New Testament passages in which the Greek word helko (to pull ) is used. On the other hand, verticality does not appear to be a contextual element for spao, unless the form anaspao is used, as it is in Acts 11:10,where it is said that the sheet in Peter’s vision was drawn back up into heaven, or in Luke 14:5, where it talks of drawing out an ass that has fallen into a pit. The form of spao in Matthew 23:51 (of Peter’s sword) is apospao, meaning to draw (pull ) out (in separation). It might be argued here that John would have used anaspao instead of helko if he had really intended to give the sense of verticality and irresistibility.
At any rate, a third word for draw in the form of drew (Greek, suro) is used to refer to an even greater intensive and coercive activity, and occurs in the New Testament without decided prejudice regarding lifting. It is used to describe those who failed to find Paul and Silas at Jason’s house, and so pulled Jason and certain brethren before the rulers after setting the entire city of Thessalonica to an uproar. It is also used to describe Paul’s body being dragged (pulled) out of the city of Lystra by those who had stoned him until they supposed him dead. It is also used in Revelation to describe the dragon which drew a third of the stars with his tail. This passage in Revelation is understood by most biblical scholars to refer to the Devil pulling along a third of the angelic host into his rebellion. Note in this case that the word for draw suggests an opposite directional meaning than upward, as Satan’s rebellion caused a betimes departure from heaven, and so presumably downward,where he became the fallen god of this world. Implied here is that the angels who joined in the rebellion approved of Satan’s intention (i.e., will). But note especially in this last example how the word drew used to describe Satan’s activity does not have the same shade of meaning as the word draw used to describe Christ’s wooing and admonishing of all men toward a consideration of Himself. Nor should the meanings of these words be the same if we consider the actions and distinctive personalities of each in their respective attempts to gain persons’ allegiances. While Strong’s suggests that helko and suro are probably akin to each other etymologically, the evidence seems speculative, and further, one cannot deny a certain difference in meaning as used in the New Testament. Furthermore, the word used of Satan’s drawing away of the angels (Revelation 12:4) is also used parabolically for Christ’s haling of rebellious men to judgment, because they did not pursue peace with Him (Lk. 12:58). Thus by the use of different verbs, Christ is showing that the haling of someone before the judgment court of Christ (as expressed by suro) is of greater intensity than that which attends the Father’s drawing (helko) of men (Jn. 6:44) or of the Son’s drawing (helko) of all men toward (Gr. pros) Himself (Jn. 12:32). Is it little wonder, then, why one word for pull is used of the Father who pulls men toward the Son, while another word for pull is used to describe the greater intensity and more coercive manner of Christ in judgment, or of the Devil in his rebellion?57
The point here is to ask why, if the Calvinistic view is correct, God should not have to act with equal intensity to foreordain every act of man? For the question is naturally raised: Is the Calvinist God less sovereignly involved in some of the acts of man than in others? Plenty of Calvinistic statements about man’s ‘freedom’ seem to point otherwise, but at the full tilt of the forward rocking-horse position regarding the absolute sovereignty of God, no-exception statements are made about God acting unilaterally. The Calvinist, then, leaves us without an explanation about why different verbs implying different intensities are used of God’s activity toward man, the one unto a consideration of salvation, and the other unto judgment. One objection the Calvinist might offer is that the different verbs merely show an attitudinal difference on the part of God and not a difference of force applied. To this objection we can reply again that, though the force of God be strong against man’s willful inability to believe, the extent of God’s force must be consistent with the kind of invitation (KJV, calling) that Christ described, even though this invitation is also a command to repent. To draw a parallel here, even as a parent would pull aside a child to command him for his own sake not to cross the street without looking both ways (or else suffer the consequence of parental punishment), so too is this coercion of the parent somewhat less when instructing the child not to cross the street, than it shall be if the parent brings the child to judgment for disobeying his instructions. In other words, the parent does not walk the child up to the edge of the street and grab the top of the child’s head in his hand and coerce it first this way and then that way to make sure the child will ‘obey’ safety rules, as though such ‘obedience’ could then be said to be a matter of the child’s will. Even so, God gives man grave warnings for man’s own sake apart from the kind of coercive force that will be brought to bear in judgment if the man acts foolishly. To the Calvinist who would reply that God’s judgment is always upon those He reprobates, we would remind him that while John 3:36 teaches that all men are under the judgment of God before any are saved, Hebrews 9:27 says that it is after a man’s death that the final judgment of God is exercised.
A further point barely touched on earlier, regarding the degree of force implied in helko, is to note the Greek preposition pros in both John 6:44 and John 12:32. The KJV renders pros as the word to, but in English the word to is often inferred by the reader to mean completed action, such as in the sentence, Bob went to the ballgame. The impression in English is that Bob is in the ballpark watching the ballgame. But the Greek word pros in the above passages in John simply means toward. Therefore when John states that the Father pulls a man toward the Son, it means something quite different than if John had said that the Father pulls a man into Christ.58 Thus no man can come toward Christ except the Father pulls him. Why? Simply because of the brute fact that the man demonstrates his unwillingness to come. [That is, technically speaking, man can come toward the Son, but apart from the Father’s encouragement he won’t. (Indeed, even with the Father’s encouragement many will not come.)] Similarly to the Father, if Christ be lifted up He will pull all men toward (Gr. pros) Himself.
Now I suppose it is conceivable that Calvinists might grant our argument about pros and add their own spin on it. Perhaps they would argue that God does draw a man toward Christ in the process of changing the man’s will, whereupon the man rushes into Christ. Or perhaps they would prefer to say that a man rushes to (toward) Christ (though we ought to ask the Calvinist at this point, Does he mean that man rushes by his own predication!) and is placed into Christ by the Father? But such a Calvinist argument regarding man’s will (so called by them) nevertheless makes indistinct the terms ‘God’ and ‘man’ in any meaningful way, as already noted. The result is that man is regarded as nothing more than a willless plant receiving a kind of divine construct of will from outside himself. The Calvinist does not understand his own illogic, and so will hardly admit to it. But all his definitions affirm this illogic, insofar that such definitions can be said to affirm illusory meaning.59
Having somewhat surveyed the verb helko, ie., to pull in the New Testament, let us now consider the general context of John 6:44 (where Jesus states that a man cannot come to Him unless the Father draws him). First, Christ describes Himself as the Bread of Life in John 6. This Bread is what the Father has sent down from heaven for the benefit of man. In this sense Christ is the spiritual reality that answers to the physical manna which God had sent down to sustain the Israelites during their days in the wilderness (the O.T. manna was a point of discussion between the Pharisees and Christ in John 6). To the Israelites in the wilderness, the manna was God’s provision, something only He could miraculously provide. But note that God didn’t impart to their stomachs or bodies the food they needed regardless of their desire. Each man had to have a submissive and receptive spirit. Each one had to decide to leave his tent and go receive that which God had provided for him.60This physical manna in the Old Testament is thus symbolic of the spiritual manna which God gave men in the New Testament (i.e., His Son), which men are called upon to receive by taking. Again, the word received in John 1:12, “But as many as received him (Christ), to them gave he the power to become the sons of God,” means to receive by taking, and is actually translated take in Matthew 26:26 “Take, eat; this is my body.” It is an active, not passive, type of receiving.
The Bible also describes receiving (as in receiving manna) in terms of looking (with belief) upon Jesus. We are like those in Moses’ time who were commanded to look upon the serpent on the pole if they desired to live. Note that God didn’t command Moses to drag the Israelites to the bronze serpent so that the priestly Levites could then use their thumbs to force open the people’s eyelids so that the people couldn’t help but see the serpent on the pole whether they wanted to or not (and so be healed). That is the picture of God the Calvinist wants to overlay upon John 6:44, i.e., one of irresistible coercion. But that is not how the Bible describes looking with belief. Rather, Moses lifted up the serpent on the pole so that all those who were willing to receive God’s method of healing would believe and look upon it by faith. Yet many did not believe and so died in the wilderness. Clearly, then, while man cannot raise himself to heaven through an atonement of his own because of actual inability, he can, if God provides an atonement for him, come to Christ by exercising his will to take and receive Him. So the Father must provide an atonement if man is to be saved, but man must willingly receive this atonement which he cannot provide for himself. Thus, God graciously gives us His Son, the Bread of Life, and all who receive Him live. A sense of lifting carries through the last phrase of John 6:44: “and I will raise him up at the last day.” God makes the work of the cross potentially effective for all men, so that even at the last day the risen Christ might raise up those who have believed in Him. All who receive the Bread of Life will one day be raised from the dead; and their final abode will be that same place from where the Bread of Life came down.
The problem of Calvinism, then, is its failure to understand Jesus’ implicit statement about receiving in John 6. And the concept of receiving in John 6 is the very same as that of John 1:12. Yet the word received in John 1:12 means nothing intelligible to a Calvinist. This may sound harsh, but it is putting the matter frankly. Nowhere in verse 12 or in the surrounding context is it suggested that God imparts a new nature so that men can be said to passively receive Christ. The word simply does not mean that. The Calvinist may make much ado about man “rushing to Christ” upon his ‘regeneration,’ which they claim precedes the man’s belief, but that is not the sequence of events as described in John 1:12.61 The chronological order surrounding belief is: 1) God has further enlightened every man’s proper conscience through a) creation, and b) the incarnation of His Son who has provided atonement for man; 2) a man decides to receive (take) Christ; 3) whereupon a man is given the right by God to become His child. I do not mean to suggest here than a man earnestly seeks God apart from God drawing him up to behold the work of the Son. As Psalm 14:1-3 says, no man diligently62 seeks God. Rather, I am only saying that a new nature cannot be imparted to man prior to his belief, since the Bible states that the man himself believes. (Again, cp. Rom. 4:5, which says that Abraham believed God.) Furthermore, remember the words of John 10:27, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” This is the Great Shepherd’s call, and the sheep who recognize His voice are the callees who act upon the voice of the Great Shepherd and follow Him. This means a response is necessary on the part of the hearer-a bleating of the voice for the Shepherd. But, of course, a sheep, if he wished, could bite the hand of the would-be rescuing shepherd. For the sheep might fear that it would be too painful to be pulled through the thorny bush to safety. While it’s actually hard to imagine a sheep choosing such a foolish end, this type of foolishness is characteristic of the man who refuses God’s grace because he wants to remain in the thorniness of his sin.
Utter Depravity, Utter Oneness, Utter Bliss
Calvinists appear to take the thorniness of sin very seriously, but in fact they have forsaken a sound understanding of the nature of sin. R.C. Sproul, for example, following the classic argument of the famed, 18th century Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, argues that man is so completely dead in his sins that any response on man’s part is impossible. Sproul argues that God alone must entirely change a man’s desire if the man is to be saved. To show how God is the sole participant in changing a man’s desire, Sproul contrasts his Calvinism with the Arminian position:
In this (Arminian) view fallen man is seen as a drowning man who is unable to swim. He has gone under twice and bobbed to the surface for the last time. If he goes under again he will die. His only hope is for God to throw him a life preserver. God throws the lifeline and tosses it precisely to the edge of the man’s outstretched fingers. All the man has to do to be saved is to grab hold. If he will only grab hold of the life preserver, God will tow him in. If he refuses the life preserver, he will certainly perish. Again in this (Arminian) illustration the utter helplessness of sinful man without God’s assistance is emphasized. The drowning man is in a serious condition. He cannot save himself. However, he is still alive; he can still stretch forth his fingers. His fingers are the crucial link to salvation. His eternal destiny depends upon what he does with his fingers. (But) Paul says the man is dead. He is not merely drowning, he has already sunk to the bottom of the sea. It is futile to throw a life preserver to a man who has already drowned. If I understand Paul, I hear him saying that God dives into the water and pulls a dead man from the bottom of the sea and then performs a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He breathes into the dead man new life.xliii
We should note here to what extent Calvinists take the man to be ‘dead’ at the bottom of the lake. To understand the extent of this deadness, we must further consider what the doctrine of total depravity means, since to the Calvinist the term total depravity equals this deadness. Sproul defines it as the following:
Total Depravity is a very misleading term. The concept of total depravity is often confused with the idea of utter depravity. In Reformed theology total depravity refers to the idea that our whole humanity is fallen. That is, there is no part of me that has not been affected in some way by the Fall …(but) Total depravity is not utter depravity. Utter depravity would mean that we are all as sinful as we possibly could be. We know that is not the case. No matter how much each of us has sinned, we are able to think of worse sins that we could have committed.xliv
Thus Sproul appears to define a man’s total depravity as horizontally comprehensive (i.e., affecting every area across the spectrum of life) but not vertically comprehensive (i.e., not affecting any area to a total saturation of its depth). Boettner likewise concurs with Sproul that a difference exists in the ‘deadness’ of Total Inability and Utter Depravity:
This doctrine of Total Inability which declares that men are dead in sin, does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be . . .xlv
But despite such statements about total depravity not equaling utter depravity, the two are soon confused with each other in Calvinistic theology, as shown here in Boettner’s view:
The unregenerate man can, through common grace, love his family and he may be a good citizen. He may give a million dollars to build a hospital, but he cannot give even a cup of cold water to a disciple in the name of Jesus… All of his common virtues or good works have a fatal defect in that his motives which prompt them are not to glorify God; a defect so vital that it throws any element of goodness as to man wholly into the shade.xlvi
Thus Boettner states that if a man gives the appearance of acting righteously, it is only because God’s common grace is involved. Remove the common grace, then, and the man would be utterly depraved, since all of man’s motives (according to Boettner) are wrong. But this raises a question. Why doesn’t Boettner see a contradiction in stating that 1) no man is as bad as he could be (as evidenced, says Boettner, by man being found in total, not utter, depravity), while yet stating that 2) no man has any correct motives whatsoever? For we must ask: Wouldn’t the definition of utter depravity mean that man does not have any correct motives whatsoever? Boettner seems unaware that Paul states in Romans 2:14-15 that even Gentiles who lived apart from the Mosaic law did by nature the things contained in the law, even to the point of accusing or excusing one another. The fact that a Gentile could excuse even one thing in a fellow man, i.e., by realizing in that man an act which was ethically and justifiably excusable in some sense, would indicate that such men, though unsaved, were able to do something good. As for Boettner’s objection that all of a man’s motives or good works have the fatal defect of not wanting to glorify God, we would say it is doubtful whether any Christian is fully free of this same defect. Even Paul said “I am the chief of sinners” well into his ministry, and he was given a thorn in the flesh to prevent his pride from asserting itself after he was caught up to the third heaven and given a special vision. Indeed, even Christians may deceive themselves into thinking they are loving God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength, when in fact they are not. As John says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Whatever the motives of men may be, the truth of Romans 2:14-15, i.e., that even Gentiles can do something good and sometimes do act in some sense ethically excusable, must always be maintained. Thus Boettner’s point cannot be supported when he says that “any element of goodness as to man [is put] wholly into the shade” (emphasis added) simply because man does not keep the Great commandment. Man may, and indeed does at times, obey the 2nd (neighborly) command of the New Testament in some sense, or else Paul could not have said that Gentiles sometimes act excusable [in some way and in some sense].
Nevertheless, since Boettner claims that all of man’s motives are self-directed, one wonders why he draws a distinction between total depravity and utter depravity. Suppose, for example, that there are a total of four apples on the grocery shelf. An utterly depraved man would steal all four apples. Boettner is saying that if a man were to steal only three apples, two, one, or even none at all, the only reason he has done so is because God’s common grace is restraining him. But since Boettner is suggesting that the only reason a man gives the appearance of right doing is because of common grace, then if the common grace were removed from the man, it would reveal his utter depravity. Take away the common grace of God, then, and all men would be stealing four apples. So for the Calvinist, the only difference between total depravity and utter depravity is the intervention of God’s common grace. Such grace (again, according to the Calvinist) is the only reason why men are not all equally bad or doing every possible evil thing they can. How then, we ask, can a man be totally depraved without the nature of that depravity also being utter? For Boettner, the introduction of God’s grace comes to a man when he is already in his natural state of intending to steal all four apples. Any attempted distinctions by Calvinists between total depravity and utter depravity are therefore meaningless, because latent within Calvinism’s concept of total depravity is always utter depravity, since anything short of stealing four apples relies accordingly on some supposed version of God’s grace. The extent, then, to which our man is spiritually dead at the bottom of the lake is as radical as Calvinists can imagine, since they would claim that the intention of any man, left to himself, is to steal four apples.
Not surprisingly, then, Sproul’s conclusion about the drowned man is that the man’s deadness is so irreversible that God must, apart from any human participation whatsoever, ‘regenerate’ the man. There is nothing which the man can do, or even to which he can respond. He is totally functionless and inoperative. To suggest that the man is functional or operative in any spiritual way is, for Sproul, nothing less that the ascription of works. Sproul’s definition of ‘works,’ then, is the spiritualized version of the physicist’s definition-that of movement, enactment, or response. Even man’s receiving of Christ is, according to Sproul, a work.
But Sproul’s idea of what constitutes work is obviously problematic, since he includes faith as a work. An analogy can serve us here. Suppose a father were to buy a dress for his five-year old daughter and hand it to her on Christmas day in a gift-wrapped package of ribbon and bow. Let us assume that the small girl receives the gift gladly, opens the box, and is delighted at having the dress. Would we say that she has earned the garment in any way? No-certainly not. Furthermore, she is incapable of entering the work force as a laborer to earn money to buy the dress for herself. Would we say, then, that in receiving the gift of the dress, she had worked for it? Again, no. But if this is the case, why does Sproul insist that a man’s reception of the gospel has to be considered working for it? Apparently, Sproul has forgotten that Paul’s discussion of Romans 4 is a contrast between grace and the wage earner, not grace and non-predication.
Nevertheless, because Sproul accepts works as meaning any form of faith-predication whatsoever, a natural question arises about the man at the bottom of the lake said to be absolutely dead and inoperative. Namely, if God brings this man up to sit with Christ in heavenly places, how can we say that this man has participated in his conversion, i.e. to the extent that he has taken Christ (Jn. 1:12)? That is, how is it that he has faith? For if God does the work of faith in the man’s heart without man allowing or disallowing that act, then it must be God who is doing the believing rather than the man. For if the man is in a completely inoperative mode, then God is doing the surrogate believing on behalf of ‘him.’ Sproul attempts an explanation by defining the desire and will of man so that they appear different, when, in fact, he demonstrates no essential distinction in meaning. Indeed, if a man must choose according to his strongest desire, how is the meaning of the word “desire” different from the meaning of “will,” except that it describes an ‘earlier’ stage in the same phenomenon? Or how is man’s will different from God’s implanted desire? To so define desire and will, and God and man, as indistinguishable, is all part of the irrationality subtly advocated by Sproul and Edwards. With Sproul and Edwards, then, it is not that the man has faith (if we grant any meaning whatsoever to the individuation of these terms for the moment), but that faith has been found in the man. It is not that the man believes, but that belief has been found in the man. Thus, for the Calvinist, man ‘receives’ Christ as a fighter might ‘receive’ a bloody nose or a child might ‘receive’ a spanking, i.e., in a totally passive way apart from any willingness to receive it.
Furthermore, because of Sproul’s definition of desire, any attempt at saying that man “rushes to Christ” upon receiving a new implant from God is an attempt to maintain the dialectical side of human “freedom” and “choice” within Reformed theology, not to mention a defense Sproul needs in order to explain the active form of the verb ‘receive’ in John 1:12. In any final analysis, all such Reformed-defined terms are reversible (man’s choice/God’s construct), and therefore no real distinctions are being made between God and man.
To understand the implications of this Calvinistic view, consider that I am in a chair writing this page. All of the molecules that make up my being (according to Sproul elsewhere in his book) are in sovereign control by God. According to Sproul and Boettner (who follow Edwards) any faith that I have has been a result of God putting a new desire in me apart from my willingness. Indeed, had God not implanted a new desire in me, I would have remained as I was. But the question arises-If Calvinism says that God has placed His desire in Dan against Dan’s desire, then Dan’s desires have been negated in order to receive the construct of God. That is, without God’s forceful and coercive removal of Dan’s own desires, Dan would simply remain as he is. How then, for example, can Sproul or Edwards say that this new desire is Dan’s desire? For if I now say the sentence, “God has changed my desire” there is an illusion of meaning because there is no more ‘my.’ God has overthrown the ‘my.’ He has negated the ‘my’ and replaced the vacuum with His desire. The only way, then, that ‘Dan’ could say that “God has changed my desire” is if we reduce the ‘my’ to particle physics. Thus, in place of Dan’s essence is now a bio-organic automaton that, in effect, calls up a program that God has put within him to give the illusion that when the automaton speaks saying, “I am Dan, and my desire has been changed,” Dan and his desire are still present, when in fact they are not. In reality ‘Dan’ must only be a bio-computer which God has made out of material creation. So the mass of collective molecules in process that sits in a chair, which we call ‘Dan,’ has been the object of God’s construct. ‘Dan,’ for that matter (as previously noted), could be a laundry basket for all the distinction that Calvinism requires. The ‘my’ enacts no final thinking or willing as a separate entity distinct from God. Thus ‘man’ is a non-predicated being, and the uniqueness that distinguishes him from a laundry basket is lost. For God could just as well sustain the being of a laundry basket, a plant, or an automaton in His presence, and cause it to echo back His constructs as willless computers with no consciousness. Either way it is God’s continuation of an object’s being in His presence-and that is all. We see then that under Calvinism the result is a total annihilation of the person, because to say that “God chooses another person’s choice” is the same type of irrationality that would say that “somebody else is me.”
There is a disturbing implication in Calvinistic theology here. The consistency in accepting this paradigm is to see the ‘my’ as a mere extension of God’s thought. The ‘my’ is seen as the Logos or Idea of God. And since in Calvinism every ‘my’ is the construct of God, there is no final thought identity of the ‘my’ apart from God. Every ‘my’ has been dissolved in God and has become an expression of His Godhead. The ‘my’ is God, and God is the ‘my,’ and so the entire Cosmos becomes the expression of a God who moves molecules about to receive His constructs.
The implications of the Edwardian view for the Creation now become plain. Since Calvinism confuses God with the ‘my,’ distinctions between the Creator and sentient creation become lost. And if all ideas and will in the creation are only those of the Creator, then we are all part and parcel of God, having no thought and will identity apart from Him. Thus in some sense we are all participants with God in His all-sovereign activities. We were with Him in the Creation, in the Fall, in the sacrifice of Christ-indeed, in any and all history, and in eternity past. All thought experience and mental and spiritual being is comprehended in Us (rather, ‘Us’), for we ‘persons’ and God are One.63
Such a conclusion of indivisible oneness with God is always the result of those authors and thinkers who apply such a dialectical ’solution’ to their Calvinistic assumptions. The result are ‘definitions’ of desire and will, and God and man, that are indistinguishable in their pairings. Is it any wonder, then, that it was from within Calvinistically influenced denominations64 that there arose during the twentieth century certain influential neoorthodox theologians, such as Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth, who amalgamated their beliefs with various secular philosophies until they believed that God could become His opposite and yet remain true to Himself? Such teachings by these thinkers proved that these were merely the consistent conclusions that follow from Calvin’s dialectical theology. Thus Christianity, which is suppose to uphold that A cannot equal non-A [i.e.,as in bitter cannot be sweet (Is. 5:20) and righteousness cannot be unrighteousness (2 Cor. 6:14)] as well as that Christ is mutually and exclusively the Savior of the world, instead is succumbing to a rigorously applied Calvinism until all meaningful distinctions are lost. For whenever Calvinism is applied, definitions are no longer definitions, and so anything may at the same time be its otherness.
Yet despite the position on total depravity to which the Edwardian position leads, Calvinists would certainly call the above conclusions caricatures of their views. In any Calvinistic treatise they would point to many statements where man is said to be fully responsible for his sin and therefore a free moral agent who acts apart from outside coercion. (Indeed, one wearies of online Calvinists making such claims on the internet about their opponents misrepresenting them.) Man is far from being a laundry basket, they would say, and always maintains his particularity. But if one would tell them that their view of human freedom thus eliminates the absolute sovereignty of God, the same Calvinists would point out many other statements in the same Calvinist treatises where the absolute sovereignty of God is asserted with equal conviction. So the two principles are held in contradiction. This is why it is difficult to convince Calvinists of their God/’my’ amalgamation; i.e., because in fact they have unwittingly accepted an illusion of separateness and therefore an illusion of meaning (because, we note, the proper meaning of things demands separateness of definition). Because Calvinists believe that God constitutes all thought experience, yet maintains a respective distance from Man’s thought and will, it is always Catch-22 for the non-Calvinist in debate.
54Apparently, Sproul does not see the possibility of a connection between can and may under any biblical circumstances. Thus Sproul: “Who has not been corrected by a schoolteacher for confusing the words can and may?” (Sproul, p. 67). Regarding this point of can versus may, it is again interesting to note that Christ Himself said that “The Son can (Gr. dunamai i.e., powers to ) do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do” (Jn. 5:19). But as previously noted, the experience and statements of the Son during His hour of agony in Gethsemane show that the Son indeed did have a will capable of doing what was opposed to what the Father wanted, even to a point of calling down rescue by legions of angels. Thus Christ’s point in John 5:19 is that the Son, at the time he spoke this, powered not to act on His own because of His absolute unwillingness to do so, and because His desire was the same as His Father’s at that time, and thus not because of any general disablement of the will relating to possibility.
55Note: interestingly enough, B.F. Westcott takes the cognate ekelko in James 1:13 to mean to lure out (by bait), in a hunting sense; hence, to entice.
56Terry Gross put it more diplomatically than I am putting it here.
57The word for ‘draw’ in John 12:32, which is also used in James 2:6: (”Do not rich men oppress you, and draw [pull] you before the judgment seats?”) does not necessarily imply the same force as that found in Luke 12:58, where the rightness of the adversary (as parabolically pointing to Christ) is assumed to be upright and earnest, whereas the moral authority of a rich man (if ‘authority’ it be called) lies chiefly in his riches, a fact not lost upon the rich man himself. Therefore, while a rich man would hope his (probably often dubious) charges in court would be accepted with no small force, it would (we hope at least) hardly carry the conviction than that of those poorer than he whose arguments were often given with the knowledge that they had been truly wronged. But another solution seems more probable than this one IF James was using hyperbole to make a point about pulling in the sense of dragging, even as the tongue, for example, is said to be “a world of iniquity.” In all likelihood rich men did not literally drag, or have others drag, their adversaries by the heels into court. But the real point here is that men were dragged against their will, not in a sense in which their will ever changed. The biblical context is key when interpreting the force of helko, even as with the word ‘give,’ which we explained in an earlier footnote. As a side note, it should be observed that the judgment seats of some cities were likely at an elevated place relative to the city’s popular dwellings (in order to symbolically convey the loftier, formal decisions for which civic courts were responsible), and so the James 2:6 passage may still be considered supportive of the verticality at least generally evidenced in the New Testament’s use of the Greek word helko.
58Thus while we are told elsewhere that we are placed in the heavenlies, this action of the Father must be congruent with all other statements about the process of a man coming to be reconciled with God, whereupon that man is placed in Christ.
59[See p. 225ff, including footnote 63 (which begins on p. 228), detailing yet again how the word ‘man’ in the term ‘the will of man’ ceases to have meaning in Calvinist theology.] As C.S. Lewis has stated the matter in a similar context, God can do all things, but they must be things; they cannot be non-things.
60The objection that might be proposed by Calvinists here, that God irresistibly controls even the people’s decisions and actions to obtain the manna, is rank eisegesis, i.e., the arbitrary reading of one’s theology into the text. Such an ‘answer’ attempts to lengthen, so to speak, the strings on the marionette to a point where it becomes a total mystery to man how the Puppeteer could exert absolute manipulation of him. But the various Old Testament examples of the Israelites’ faith (or at other times unbelief) point to man’s own role of response.
61Says Sproul (pp. 61-62): “Edwards and all who embrace the Reformed view of predestination agree that if God does not plant that desire [for God] in the human heart no one, left to themselves, will ever freely choose Christ.” But the question for Sproul is how such a “desire” would be the man’s and not God’s? That is, how is such an implanted desire a result of a man who “freely chooses Christ?” The ‘his’ in “his desire” is no longer present for the one receiving the implant (against his will), for the ‘his’ would be exterminated by the implant. Needless to say, the man’s ‘his’ is kept around for the Calvinist’s convenience in order to make it appear that the Calvinist still accepts man as a distinctive.
Thus Sproul believes that God enables a man in the state of total inability, and he quotes Augustine’s attempted distinction between “free will” and “liberty.” Says Sproul: “Augustine got at the problem by saying that fallen man has a free will but lacks liberty.” Thus, Sproul claims that fallen man has a choice,but evidently (we note) only of one thing (which readers of common sense will recognize is not really a choice). Non-Reformers rightly regard such definitions as irrational. (Indeed, I wonder how ‘free’ any American would feel if his U.S. representative knocked on his door to tell him that although he still had freedom, the President and Congress decided he would no longer have liberty. Would he really feel that such a statement was congruent? But dress up the door knocker in theological dress and the statement becomes ‘profound’! Thus, this is mere rocking horse methodology on the part of Augustine-using the synonyms freedom and liberty but defining them as antonyms in order to maintain an irrationality of definition. Unfortunately, Sproul falls prey to accepting Augustine’s contradiction despite his professed distaste for parallel lines that meet in eternity type explanations. Because Augustine doesn’t use the exact same word, Sproul is deceived. Had Augustine said, ‘man has freedom but he has no freedom,’ presumably Sproul would have seen the nonsense of it all. But Augustine’s use of the difference of vocal sounds of these synonyms (”freedom” and “liberty”) while defining them as antonyms, passes unchecked.
Sproul himself does something similar, taking a pair of words (receive, and regenerate) and defining them as near antonyms to support his soteriology. I say “near” because, while both terms properly refer to the instant one is born again, receiving is the instant man takes Christ, whereas ‘regeneration,’ though occurring the same instant, is one in which God (according to His foreknowledge which makes it possible for him to anticipate the instant of man’s choice) declares the one believing to be a child of God. Thus biblically speaking, receiving and regeneration happen simultaneously. If this were not the case, then one could believe prior, or subsequent, to becoming a child of God, which is illogical, since in the former case this would mean that one could believe without being a child of God, or, in the latter case, that one could be declared a child of God without believing. Sproul, however, takes the vocal sound “regenerated,” and the vocal sound “receiving Christ,” and attaches unbiblical meanings to them by defining them as happening upon different instances. For observe that he states that regeneration is God’s implant in a man for a new desire for God, which allegedly happens prior to that man’s belief, whereupon the man then “rushes” to receive Christ. Sproul believes that such a man must rush to Christ, and thus, as man cannot be properly understood by us to have a choice in the matter, we must here, if we are to remain consistent in argument, state that the man as defined by Sproul is merely moved materially as God’s construct, and nothing more. Sproul has simply taken the word “regeneration” and given it his own meaning apart from sound biblical theology, i.e., as it ought to be biblically, historically, lexically, and contextually defined. But again, a proper understanding of biblical regeneration is that a man is saved upon belief, i.e. upon the instant of belief, for John 1:12 states that (Int.) “But as many as received Him, He gave to them authority to become children of God, to those believing into the name of Him.” Nothing of divine empowerment that “leads to” (as Sproul words it)the childship of the believer is suggested in the Bible prior to man’s faith. Yet, further, in one place Sproul actually states (p. 117) that “Rebirth produces new life” (emphasis added), when it should be understood that rebirth, as defined in John 3, is the beginning of life, not something that leads to life. Sproul is forced to these kind of irrational definitions and expressions not from any proper Scriptural exegesis, but because his Reformed interpretation of other scriptural passages demands it. In this way he gives the appearance that the salvation of man is only of God’s will, yet of man’s will, too.
62Again, the Greek word ’seek’ that Paul uses when quoting Psalm 14 is a word suggesting a customary and diligent form of seeking, as contrasted to the possibility of seeking. Note that Calvinists always regard the deadness of a man who is dead in sin to be more radical that the aliveness of a man who is alive in Christ; for the one alive in Christ may nevertheless still sin, while the one dead in sin is assumed by Calvinists not to be capable of any goodness whatsoever. [See Ephesians 2, in which Calvinists apply more force to the deadness of being dead in sin, than to the aliveless of being alive in Christ. I use the term ‘more force’ with the reader’s understanding, since, technically speaking, the Calvinist’s view of deadness is irrational, having (unwittingly) defined man as annihilated in will and therefore unable to believe and be alive in Christ.]
63I once had an exit meeting with a pastor from one of the churches I attended in which we discussed the doctrine of Irresistible Grace. (For those readers wishing to skip the details of this conversation and a related discussion about Foreknowledge and Irresistibility, please forward past this footnote.) The problem, of course, with the doctrine of Irresistibility is that God and man are treated as One and not maintained as distinctive beings. This oneness is achieved (according to the Calvinist) through God’s will being performed through the spiritually dead or blind one. Thus during the meeting, this pastor emphasized the deadness and blindness of the sinner and claimed that God had to remove the blindfold for a sinner to see. On the other hand I contended that I did not think this description supported John 1:12, i.e., that those born of God received, that is, took, Him. I referred the pastor to Matthew 26:26, in which the same Greek word rendered received in John 1:12 is rendered take (”Take eat, for this is my body”). Nevertheless, the pastor seemed to resurface the blindfold analogy during the conversation. At one point I asked him why God showed such exasperation in the Old Testament prophetic books if the people He addressed really had no ability to respond? (Why all the exasperation if only God could remove the blindfold?)
Anyhow, it didn’t occur to me until over a week later that the blindfold analogy the pastor had chosen was really an attempt to use a dialectical object to support his argument of Irresistibility. It was designed to make it appear that God chose that man would see, but in a way where man chose that he would see. Thus the causal agent behind the decision to see was blurred beyond distinction. And yet the words God and man seemed to remain, at a psychological level, distinct terms in our conversation because of the normal way in which everyone, including this pastor and I, thinks of these words. But in fact the only real distinction one could infer from this pastor’s blindfold analogy was an aural difference in the vocal sound ‘God ‘and the vocal sound ‘man.‘ And so during our conversation about the blindfolded man, the pastor was (unwittingly) taking the concept ‘man’ and apologetically defining it to be synonymous with the concept ‘God,’ until neither term had any real meaning (though of course these words appeared to have meaning).
In other words, a man who is as dead as Sproul defines him to be (i.e., drowned), cannot see simply because God takes the blindfold off. After all, he’s dead, isn’t he? Sproul’s description of God going down to the bottom of the lake and bringing the man up and breathing life into him is suggestive here. It means that God must-if we are to be consistent with an analogy of a blindfold, i.e., be faithful in expressing the kind of deadness that Sproul describes (and which is obviously implied if man needs irresistible grace)-not merely remove the blindfold, but also open the eyes of the sinner, give him sight, and give him the will to look. So where, I ask, is a man’s predicating faith in any of that? The pastor was assuming that man has the will to look, yet because of blindness could not look at anything except the inside of the blindfold. But that is not the kind of radical deadness which this pastor’s Calvinistic theology really demands of him, i.e., as exampled by Sproul’s drowned man. (Indeed, since when does removing a blindfold from a drowned man do something for the drowned man’s sight?) For as we have previously shown, it is impossible to point to a time in Sproul’s analogy of the drowned man when the man exercises faith. It is all God’s doing. For notice that the man (according to Sproul) is dead until God gives him ‘life.’ [Remember that the words ‘life,’ ‘seeing,’ and ‘faith’ are each defined dialectically by the Calvinist, since these things must be considered ‘man’s,’ yet also the result of ‘God’s‘ unilateral activity. Yet note in this regard that Christ said, “one must see the Son and believe.” (Jn. 6:40)] It is not simply a matter of God taking off the blindfold when we are stubborn about it. We must also believe (have faith). Thus a man taking Christ (placing his faith in Christ) is nowhere possible in such analogies as that offered by Sproul or by my former pastor. In other words, if a blindfold (or drowned man) analogy is offered that cannot say when a man could exercise his faith, then I contend it has not provided that a man could exercise his faith. Indeed, if the man is really as dead as the Calvinist claims, then man is a willless thing that cannot take Christ by faith (I use the word ‘thing,’ I dare not use the word man, since man implies decisional ability and therefore special dignity and sentient being, all of which the Calvinist denies by implication).
Sproul, facing this dilemma of trying to account for a man’s belief, actually gives an additional analogy elsewhere in his book, in which the man “rushes to Christ” after God has allegedly given the man the desire to receive Christ (a desire which Sproul, though he does not admit to doing it, equates with the will [that is, in its latter stage (as though it could have a latter stage)]. But where, we ask, is man “rushing to Christ” in Sproul’s drowned man analogy? It is nowhere to be seen, because obviously the analogies contradict each other. Such chaos was inevitable in any analogy Sproul could have invoked. This is because Sproul is on the dialectical rocking horse of Calvinistic theology trying to go in two directions, first forward, then backward. And since he will not recognize a man’s absolute sovereignty over his own decision to accept or reject Christ, Sproul can only imply the kind of combined, absurd analogy of a drowned man rushing to Christ! (This betimes emphasis on “deadness” is why Dave Hunt, for example, says that the Calvinist confuses spiritual death with physical death whenever he draws this inappropriate parallel; for if a dead man cannot respond to God, neither can a dead man sin nor be held accountable for sin.) (Incidentally, I highly recommend Dave Hunt’s 90-minute youtube presentation on Calvinism. Hunt has a real grasp of Calvinism, and he has the kind of clarity in presentation only possible for someone with the teaching gift.)
Now, the fact of man’s absolute sovereignty over his own decision to follow or not follow God’s plan for himself is dramatically seen in a passage often overlooked in the Calvinist debate-the story of God’s vineyard in Isaiah 5. In fact, this is why I brought this passage up to my pastor. Isaiah tells us that God planted a vineyard on a fertile hill, cultivated it, removed the stones, planted the choicest of vines, made a tower, and prepared a wine vat.
“Then He expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between Me and My vineyard. What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?”
As a result God says He will bring judgment upon His vineyard-the house of Israel (v. 7) and the men of Judah, His delightful plant (v. 7). Why, then, in all this description cannot the Calvinist see that God is expecting man to respond? That is, why is God’s rhetorical question not taken at face value, so that it is conceded that God did all that was necessary to expect a proper response of good grapes? To continue to speak of Irresistibility in the face of the Vineyard story in Isaiah 5 (as this pastor did in the meeting I just alluded to) surprised me. But, in fact, that is what happened during my exit meeting. For once I raised the subject of this parable, this pastor reinterpreted it, claiming that God would do more, that is, provide His Spirit, and further suggested that a parallel be understood between Isaiah 5 and the New Testament parable of the Sower. In retrospect I now see even more clearly that the point of the Vineyard parable is not whether God would do more (i.e., offer His Spirit), but whether He should have done more before expecting a positive response. The text’s answer in Isaiah is an emphatic No. God Himself states that He expected (i.e., had the just expectation of) the vine to bring forth good grapes. It was thus reasonable that God should get the response His investment deserved (even though it would be hundreds of years before the Spirit of God was given to those who believed in Christ). Yet obviously, such a response could only be the case if man’s will were free. Such human freedom brings to mind a classic passage regarding man’s will, i.e., Romans 1, which shows that God’s power and nature was so evident in creation that God expected (that is, had a right to expect) Gentiles to respond differently than they did. Why? Because their will was free.
As to this pastor’s statement that a parallel existed between the Vineyard story and the New Testament Parable of the Sower, I also see now upon further reflection that the fertile, cultivated field in Isaiah 5 represents God’s offered provision, whereas the soils in the New Testament Parable of the Sower represent a variety of human predispositions towards God’s provision. A tightening of definition also shows that Isaiah’s message is addressed to a nation comprised of both believers and unbelievers, whereas the New Testament parable of the Sower is about all men in need of salvation (Lk. 8:12). Because my pastor did not make this distinction about what the ground represented in each story, he could not accept the plain meaning of God’s rhetorical question in Isaiah 5. In fact, his conclusion was the only conclusion possible as a Calvinist, i.e., that both soils represented the activity and will of God, and that man was non-predicative. Thus he merely mish-mashed the representative elements of the parables into the kind of definitions which his Reformed view required, so that divine irresistibility might be thought represented in these parables, i.e., so that God could be thought to choose man’s choices.
Now, moving away from my discussion with my former pastor for a moment, let us consider that another and very serious problem regarding the doctrine of Irresistibility is that it relies on a false lexical appeal regarding foreknowledge. Thomas Edgar clearly exposes the misguided attempt by Calvinists to redefine foreknowledge so that it fits the template of their theology (the reader is greatly urged to Google Thomas Edgar foreknowledge to read Edgar’s article). For observe that God would need to have non-determinative foreknowledge if the terms God and man should remain properly distinct from each other and not be treated as synonymous in meaning. God would need such foreknowledge for Him to declare that a person was born of God upon the instant of a man’s faith, so that God could impart to him the Spirit upon the man’s belief. That is, God would need foreknowledge as we have defined it in this book, not as the Calvinist defines it, who applies a different meaning to the word than lexically justifiable, owing to his refusal to allow New Testament lexical definitions to also be informed by 1) extra-biblical, contemporary sources and 2) biblical passages where God is not the grammatical subject.
A rather disturbing example of how far a Calvinist can go in trying to force-fit the lexical evidence into a preconceived Calvinistic template is found in the youtube presentation of Romans 9 by well-known Reformed apologist, James White. During White’s prologue in part-1 (of a 5-part download presentation) in which White sets up the main body of his speech with some comments on Romans 8:28ff, he argues (to the effect) that foreknowledge, in its (active) verb form, not its noun form, when God is the subject, in the New Testament, has to mean ‘intimate knowledge,’ since the object is personal in nature and not of mere actions, and thus to foreknow (according to White) cannot be understood as merely meaning to know in advance (as Arminians argue). We give White’s statement below, conceding that, though it is impossible to fully render into text the totality of any speaker’s voice inflections so that primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., emphases are all properly conveyed, we have tried to italicize what words White himself seems to give particular vocal emphasis to:
“Let me just stop long enough to challenge in the minds of anyone who thinks that this term,‘foreknew,’ as a verb, is the same thing as the noun-(to simply have foreknowledge)-that you are wrong, and that you need to look at the text of Scripture and realize this is an active verb-this is something God is doing. And every time God is the subject, and this is the verb-in the N.T.-the object is personal, it’s never actions. To simply say, ‘God knew who was going to believe,’ there is no example of that statement in the N.T.-it’s not there.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiTxBftvqnM
Now, though I have personally found White’s book on the KJV controversy (a separate matter) very helpful (incidentally, I recommend the book), and recognize White as a serious thinker, what is the listener to make of White’s argument regarding foreknowledge? That is, why the lexical split in fundamental meaning between a verb and its own noun? Are we really to infer from White’s comments that, for example, when Peter tells us that God’s election of us is according to His foreknowledge (noun), that this noun’s lexical meaning (i.e., ‘knowledge in advance‘) is a fundamentally different one than the related verb form which Paul refers to in Romans 8:29, when he states that [God] foreknew (verb) (i.e., according to White’s general view, intimately knew) whom he would predestine? We grant the obvious superficial distinction between a verb and its companion noun, but what of it? For example, a man throws (verb) a baseball, and thus has made a throw (noun) of a baseball, but where is there any fundamentally different sense between these two words beyond the superficially grammatical one?
One argument that at first glance might seem to truly advance White’s position is if the verb foreknew and the noun foreknowledge in Greek have lexical histories that show fundamentally different meanings (besides their obvious grammatical difference). For example, hypothetically, one might by analogy (in defense of White) argue that the words ’social’ and ’socialist’ are both adjectives which can either mean the same thing or have different meanings depending on who is in view. Thus, in the two phrases, 1) ‘the leader’s social policy,’ and 2) ‘the leader’s socialist policy,’ only the former phrase using the word ’social’ could refer to, say, Ronald Reagan as a fiscal Conservative, but both the former and the latter phrases could refer to a communist like Joseph Stalin (since Stalin’s social policy was also socialist). Thus one could never say ‘Ronald Reagan’s socialist policy,’ but one could say ‘Joseph Stalin’s social policy.’ In type, this is really White’s argument about why his definition should be accepted regarding foreknew. That is, White believes that God intends this kind of special-pleading definition (my term, not White’s) which he and other Calvinists accord God, because they believe that God Himself defines foreknew that way in the New Testament when God is the subject. Our objection to White’s assumption, then, is what Thomas Edgar points out in his argument about language, i.e., Why use the word ‘foreknowledge’ when ‘electing love’ would have sufficed (or, by extension, the argument as would follow from the verb form foreknew) so that a non-ambiguous phrase could have been used? That is, why would God deliberately make the language difficult to understand? Why obscure meaning? This point by Edgar thus throws the whole matter back upon the issue of lexical use, though unfortunately for White, the desired lexical history he wishes to see for the word ‘foreknew’ is just not there, i.e., not there in the extra-biblical sources (or in the New Testament when God is not the subject) which act as the control groups against theologians seeking to make a special pleading for a particular word’s lexical use. In other words, the whole kind of argument based on making synonymous the terms “social” and “socialist” is a false one. For the only reason “social” might seem to mean “socialist” in the case of Stalin is if the writer has, in the course of his essay, connotatively implied these terms to be synonymous once he describes the social policy of Stalin to be socialist. But in fact these terms are not synonymous, denotatively speaking (i.e., according to standard lexical and dictionary use, which examines the width and breadth of the word’s historical-grammatical use). In other words, the writer telling about Stalin is attempting to change the definition of “social” with the result that the reader infers also a connotative, not strictly denotative, meaning. The writer has merely read his own definition into the word “social” apart from standard lexical use. Consequently, and in the same essential manner, White has to either invent a lexical history for proginwskw to support his argument or follow the lead of someone else (like that of the Reformed commentator, Baugh, i.e., Edgar’s foil) whose lexical revisionism is already in play. This is because the biblical writers have not demonstrated any such connotative definition for “foreknew” even in the normal evolution which language sometimes demonstrates with certain words. For we note that the word “foreknew” was never part of such an evolutionary change, except insofar that an Augustinian minor subculture has taken a word like “foreknew” and redefined it for so long a time that a reader might imagine the mistaken definition to be the normal one.
Looking at this question of connotative versus denotative from another angle, consider, say, the word “act” in the phrases “the act of the sinner” and “the act of the righteous.” A Calvinist might argue that in such phrases the word “act” changes meaning based on the noun of the prepositional phrase, so that the word “act” in the phrase “the act of the sinner,” obviously means something bad, whereas in the phrase “the act of the righteous,” the word “act” means something good. So again the question ought to asked: Do words change meaning based on the noun? The answer is No,according to the word’s denotative definition, though of course allowances can be for figures of speech intended by the author. For though a Calvinist might be convinced that the word “act” in the phrase “the act of the sinner” implies something bad, observe that the phrase “the act of the sinner,” when conveyed by a Calvinist while on the front rock of the dialectical rocking horse, in fact means nothing whatsoever. But regarding cases of exception involving figures of speech, note, for example, the term “tender mercies” in the Proverbs 12:10 phrase, “the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” Here the term “tender mercies” really means the word “cruel” on a scale of things going from cruel to crueler to cruelest, and thus acts as a metonomy [a kind (form) of figure of speech]. Now there are many kinds of figures of speech, as Bullinger has pointed out. [Sidebar note (as observed previously): Furthermore, some words in Koine Greek have a closer quid pro quo relationship to informal English words than formal, such that its normal everyday use had a wider latitude of meaning than what might be inferred by an English reader today. The point here is that the term “tender mercies” doesn’t cease to have its denotative definition in the normal course of how that term is understood in everyday social use, though here in Proverbs 12:10 we recognize that the writer is using the term to serve as an idiom of speech, so that it means “cruel.” The writer does this to state that really the wicked do not exhibit tender mercies at all. Even so, idioms of speech occur in the Bible, but one of the problems in Calvinism is that idioms of speech or a word’s latitude of meaning is not recognized when man’s will is determinative, such as when John 6:44 tells us that God pulls (Gr. helko) man toward the Son. Here the word “pulls” refers to God’s positive thought-distraction in which He betimes interrupts man’s own thought process to present His own thought, such as, “You need to come to My Son for the forgiveness of sins.” Such “pulling” is within the latitude of meaning for helko, in the same sense as if I were to say, “My wife hates baseball, but I pulled her toward the ballpark.” Of course, Calvinists deny misinterpreting such latitude, and turn to the only kind of general framework which supports their dialectical, frontward-rock premise that man is always non-self determinative-that of lexical special pleading. (This method runs hand in hand with another of their related methods-finding where a verb is used denotatively upon a passive object and inappropriately claiming the same force of meaning in a passage where man’s will is the object.) Thus in the apologetics that stand behind their policy toward speech idioms, “choice” really doesn’t mean choice, and, further, God’s one and only will is really two wills which, when ‘perceived’ by our ‘limited understanding’ as two wills, is (we observe) defined de facto as mutually opposite, yet claimed by the Calvinist to be “different,” “not contradictory,” and so forth and so on-the whole gist of Calvinistic argument thus appealing to “mystery” because of its irrational nature.
But again, and to return our discussion back to the word “foreknew,” and moving somewhat past the above discussion of speech idioms, there is no reason not to accept the biblical use of “foreknew” along the lines which the New Testament-era lexical control groups support, both prior to and following the New Testament writings. So, the Calvinist can only make his case by insisting on special pleading, i.e., eisegesis. Can we prove White and Baugh wrong? Yes, as long as we accept the normal rules of language (i.e., the commonly understood definition of what words meant to people living during the New Testament era) as rationally upheld by the Spirit (just like the Spirit affirms the mathematical language of 2 + 2 = 4), i.e., by Him who seeks to affirm in the hearer/reader’s mind the correct definitions of words. As Jesus said, ‘He who has ears, let him hear.’ For, as we have already noted, consistency by itself is no real test of the truth, and words can be used just as consistently by the one opposing truth as the one telling truth.
Expect, then, more spin from Calvinists if they become aware of the additional arguments we raise against their position. Indeed, such spin is why each generation of true apologists has to combat the ongoing trek of Calvinistic spin on somewhat newer turf, since each Calvinistic generation faces new challenges from truthful apologists and responds by taking another step backward into a deeper irrationalism of increasingly bizarre ‘explanations.’ And so the Calvinistic discourse devolves into ever stranger forms. Doubtless this explains one youtube presentation which I first assumed was a sarcastic joke by an Arminian, until I realized it was, in fact, a presentation by an earnest Calvinist who purported to show in a 2-D cartoon the justification of God’s reprobation of the damned, i.e., by insisting that a cartoonist, in determining the action of the cartoon character he was drawing, was an appropriate parallel to God in His determining of a man’s will! Can such Calvinistic ‘proofs’ really become more pathetic that this? And yet some Calvinists claim we misrepresent them when we point out that their theology makes man a puppet! Would it sooner soothe their nerves if we said that their theology makes God a cartoonist? Dare I say it-when one considers that John Calvin killed some 400 persons who disagreed with him, and considers further that Calvinists in mid-17th century England imprisoned some non-Calvinist Protestant ‘heretics’ who subsequently died and (at least in some cases) left behind widows and orphans, and considers yet further that in the 21st century the echoes of such hate can now be found in the kind of vitriolic, unsparing, blue-blood responses of younger online Calvinists who are being groomed for the fight against non-Reformed Protestants-one can imagine just how guilty such a Calvinist as this cartoonist might likely feel if he found himself with the political power to persecute those who disagreed with him, especially since he equates the damned and their destiny as hardly more substantial than sheet acetate and paint. I don’t say every Calvinist is the same [they certainly are not (and perhaps even this cartoonist is not)], but it goes a long way toward explaining the anonymous, online, Calvinist brouhaha aimed at stifling books like Dave Hunt’s What is This Love?, in which Calvinist groupies rack up one-star, negative ‘reviews’ against such books as Hunt’s, which have gotten above the radar and dared to question the wisdom of John Calvin’s irrationalism which makes God and man the same. These latest disciples of Calvin, twice the children of fervor as their immediate forbears, are acting out the kind of behavior which presumably stems from the kind of idealism generally found only among the young. Upon these, perhaps, one may have pity. But upon the rest….?
At any rate (and to return to the subject of foreknew), White, a keen public debater, ought to know (and presumably does know) that in a debate one answers one’s opponent’s strongest argument first, before proceeding to build one’s own position. Presumably, this is why White anticipates an objection about foreknew based on (it would appear) Thomas Edgar (or someone else of similar mind), and this may account for why White begins his statement (quoted above) within the first minute of his 45+ minute presentation. Nevertheless, White’s ‘explanation’ is non-lexical and thus unproven; and yet we see in his method a very aggressive act that goes beyond the mere stratagem of an Augustine and a Sproul who used the synonyms ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ to doublethink their way out of having to explain the nature of personal choice and the problem of evil. Instead White employs a more audacious irrationalism, asking us to assume that the noun which derives from its own verb (or, we note, the verb which derives from its own noun-take your pick) has a fundamentally different meaning from its grammatical fellow. Of course, we don’t deny White’s claim, abstractly considered, that God knows the elect intimately, but as Thomas Edgar has shown, such a fact has nothing to do with the lexical meaning of foreknew/foreknowledge as observed across the whole spectrum of that term’s lexical use. White’s failure to show real lexical evidence, a failure stated with the kind of confidence and impressive rhetoric that gives his ‘explanation’ the likelihood of it persuading uncritical minds, typifies the Calvinist’s error of ignoring broad lexical controls that should properly inform the definition of Greek (and Hebrew) words. Thus by restricting his meaning of the verb foreknew to “God, in the New Testament,” he eliminates any extra-biblical sources, the Septuagint, and even New Testament sources where God is not the grammatical subject. In short (and again), White’s technique is special pleading. It is no more than a kind of textual ‘Rorschach test’ in which the individual imposes his own meaning upon a word symbol. In degree of irrationalism, White’s approach is somewhere between Augustine/Sproul’s ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’ which uses two synonyms, and President Clinton’s ‘explanatory’ statement (”It depends on what is ‘is’ “), in which the former President doublethought the same verb in immediate succession. Again, White, by restricting the lexical relevance of foreknew to (1) the New Testament occurrences; (2) when God is the grammatical subject; and (3) when the verb takes a personal object, is able to read his Calvinistic definition into the verb ‘foreknew,’ so that it means something like intimately loved or intimately loved and therefore chosen. As Edgar wryly notes in a similar context about the use by Calvinists of such lexically unauthorized meanings: ‘This selective approach is seldom used where the customary meaning agrees with the interpreter’s point of view.’ Thus we see that such Calvinistic special pleading is really only a theological form of literary deconstruction. And, as the apostle Paul stated with unmincing words, all such unsound doctrine finds its inspiration from, and ultimate origin in, demons (fallen angels). I do not say this lightly, for White has, in fact, suffered injustices from the professing Evangelical community in certain matters (i.e., the KJV controversy), and so one can understand a considerable exasperation on his part; but the ultimate source of origin regarding the bogus matter (of falsely defining foreknew) under review here, i.e., from which White draws inspiration apart from sound lexical evidence, must be labeled for what it is. As to the finer point of White’s assumption, i.e., that the verb “foreknew” has a different meaning depending on when God is the subject in the New Testament and the object is personal, not actions, Thomas Edgar explains why, lexically and logically, this cannot be the case:
“In [Acts] 26:2-4, the Apostle Paul testifies before Agrippa and reminds him that “all the Jews” know Paul’s life from a youth, from the beginning among his nation and in Jerusalem (26:4). He continues, “Since they know me from before (proginwskontes), from the beginning (if they want to testify), that I lived according to the strictest sect of our religion, a Pharisee” (translations are the author’s unless otherwise indicated). We should note several aspects: (1) proginwskw refers only to knowledge. There is no implication in the Jews’ words of a choice or predetermined plan. Neither is there an implication of affection or intimate and loving relationship. The Jews referred to were Paul’s enemies. (2) Several phrases establish a chronology, i.e., “from a youth, from the beginning, before.”22 (3) The most significant facet for this study is the syntax. The object of the verb proginwskw, “to foreknow,” is the personal pronoun, “me” (me). The passage is clear. Paul says, “foreknowing me . . . that I lived according to the strictest sect of our religion, a Pharisee.” The “that” (hoti) clause expresses the content of the concept “foreknowing me.” The apostle asserts “They knew me before; that is, they knew that I lived as a Pharisee.”23 Thus, to “foreknow” a person means to know something about that person beforehand. The personal object does not imply any personal, intimate ramifications, nor does it imply any deterministic concept such as election. In addition, Greek verbs commonly take an object with an idea such as “about” or “something about” implicit in the Greek verb itself, yet we must specifically supply it in English. For example, Hebrews 6:9 (NKJV) says, But, beloved, we are confident of better things concerning you. The verb, “we are confident” takes the object “better things” and could be woodenly translated, “We are confident better things.” However, the Greek verb does not need the additional word “of,” as in English, to translate “I am confident of better things.” The verb itself means “to be confident of.“This also occurs with the verb ginwskw (”know”). “The tree is known (ginwsketai) by its fruit” (Matthew 12:33) does not mean there is an intimate relationship or electing love of the person for the tree. The tree is known as to its character; something about the tree is known by its fruit. Neither the context of Acts 26:5 nor the use of a personal object gives the slightest implication that proginwskw means anything other than “to know before,” specifically to know something about Paul beforehand. Thus, the verb proginwskw with a personal object means “to know something about the person beforehand.”
“1 Peter 1:20. Referring to Christ, 1 Peter 1:20 says, “Foreknown before the foundation of the world; however, manifest in these last times for your sakes.” Baugh argues that the interpretation of “foreknown” is “a loving, committed relationship.” He says, “Here neither Christ’s faith nor any other action or attribute of his is the object of foreknowledge; rather, it was Christ himself foreknown.”24 Thus, he concludes that the verb cannot mean “prescience.” This is an all too common argument based on the personal object.25 This argument is erroneous. Acts 26:5 is particularly clear that, when this verb has a person as the object, it does not change meaning. It still means “to know before.” It specifically means to know beforehand something about PROGINWSKW that person; e.g., an action or attribute. Both the syntax of proginwskw as revealed in Acts 26:5 and normal Greek usage (including other verbs) directly contradict the argument that a personal object requires or even implies a meaning other than prescience.
“Proginwskw is commonly interpreted with a deterministic meaning in this verse.26 However, the passage and context are contrary to this nuance. The severe chronological contrast in this verse between a manifest now and foreknown before should not be overlooked.27 Aligning the statements in parallel will help clarify this since the parallel is particularly evident in the Greek:
proegnwsme,nou me.n pro. katabolh/j ko,smou
fanerwqe,ntoj de. evpV evsca,tou tw/n cro,nwn diV
u’ma/j i.e., “foreknown before the foundation of the world
but manifested in the last times for your sakes.”
22 This verb and the corresponding noun have a strong temporal aspect (NIDNTT, 1.692).
23 Hans Conzelmann, Acts: Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 186, 208; EDNT, 3:153; Richard Longenecker, Acts: EBC (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 348; Moo, Romans, 532; Johannes Munck, Acts, vol. 31: AB (New York: Doubleday), 239-41; Ben Witherington, III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Social Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 740; and an older work, H. A. W. Meyer, Acts (New York: Funk and Wagnall’s, 1883), 463. The fact that the foreknowing concerns Paul’s life; that is, something about Paul, is commonly recognized by interpreters. Cf. Bruce W. Winter and Andrew D. Clark, The Book of Acts in its First Century Setting, vol. 1: Ancient Literary Settings (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 329-30. 50 CTS Journal 9 (Spring 2003)
24Baugh, “Foreknowledge,” 196. However, Baugh gives no evidence to show why it means “loving, committed relationship.” Many interpreters prior to Baugh have asserted this.
25This erroneous argument states that since Christ, a person, is the object, it does not refer to something about Christ but to Christ himself.
Thus Edgar states, in effect, that the result is that the something about is missed by Calvinists, and so proginwskw is taken to mean something different, not merely modified, from its actual meaning. Of course, for the Calvinist, too much is at stake to abandon the personal object argument which has given them their windfall of different meanings for proginwskw, e.g., ‘to elect in love’ or ‘to determine in choice,’ etc. In short, such arguments have allowed Calvinists one small step for their definition of ‘foreknowledge,’ one giant leap for their assumption of ‘irresistibility.‘And from there it is the tiniest step to defending Augustine’s theology of One Will, i.e., a Will that operates under the various activities of ‘God,’ ‘man,’ ‘angels,’ ‘demons,’ etc., to a point where individuation of will, and therefore all personal meaning (at least besides that found in the Trinity), is lost.
But to return to the conversation I had with my Calvinistic pastor, This kind of spurning of proper lexical evidence is why my pastor read his dialectical definition into how spiritual blindness is overcome, until he embraced One Will under varying names. This dialectical trump card could then trump every other card (biblical passage) that might have been used against his Calvinism. Thus, in so doing, this pastor employed the same method that cultists use, as when the Christian Scientists, for example, insist on taking a Bible verse like “In the grave there is no remembrance of thee” and acontextualizing it until all the Scriptures that support the physical resurrection of Christ fall aside like so many dominoes, making room in the process for bizarre explanations like “the shared hallucinatory vision by the disciples,” etc. Please know I am not saying that this former pastor of mine does not believe in the physical Resurrection-he certainly does. I am merely saying his apologetic explanation stressing man’s blindness is based on the same method as cultists. As a result, his apologetic annihilates man as a distinct person from God, since man is considered unable to take Christ by faith, yet is said to have faith. (Remember that the term ‘faith’ is defined dialectically by the Calvinist.) Once more we state it: a man’s decision (the decisional instant itself) to take Christ must be unaided, or it cannot be said to be the man’s faith (i.e., his taking Christ). (This is equally true for all decisional instances of man.) So beware! For whenever a pastor, teacher, apologist, etc., goes from talking about God’s influence to talking about God’s irresistibility, or makes these two terms synonymous, he has gone over to speaking about One will, not two.
There is one other thing to be observed here (relevant to the blindfold analogy) about sinners’ “minds,” which are said to be blinded by the Devil (see 1 Cor. 3-4). The word in Greek is nousmata, meaning “thoughts,” not “minds,” the latter being that which the Calvinist-influenced KJV translators chose to render. So the question is this: Is there a difference between saying that the god of this world has blinded the mind of the unbeliever, as opposed to his thoughts? In fact, yes, there is. For the Scripture does not say that the god of this world has blinded people in order to produce unbelief. Rather, it implies that unbelief is already present (even as, in the Parable of the Sower, the hardness of the receiving ground is already present when the good seed is cast upon the stony path, making it easier for the Devil to remove the seed). The KJV’s use of the word mind is taken by many readers to mean the will, leaving these readers to conclude that the Devil has disabled man’s ability so that he cannot will good. But the Greek word ‘mind’ (if we assume merely for the moment and sake of argument that the mind is synonymous with the will) is not in the autographa. Rather, the Bible teaches that a man’s unbelief is a result stemming from the will of himself, not the will of the Devil. That the Devil (we anticipate the objection here) is stated in Scripture to capture such men (lit.) “into (at) his desire” speaks only to those opportunities he seizes to remove good seed from those whose heart-soil, by reason of its hardness, have made them a priori susceptible to the Devil’s suggestive thoughts to reject the seed. In other words, the Devil captures them into his desire because they themselves desire to reject the seed. The Devil is simply urging them along the path of desire they are accustomed to tread. In short, thoughts do not a will make. Rather, thoughts not originating from a man (though presented to him) are an influence upon that man’s will, whether they are bad thoughts from the Devil, or good thoughts from God, or thoughts of his own, which in any case are subject to the man’s mind for sole deliberation and sole decision. A final curiosity in all this is why an unbeliever rejects the seed to begin with? For in such a case the man wills himself to unbelief rather than belief, and therefore acts against his own best interest. This, I think, is the least of what the Bible must mean by the phrase, “the mystery of iniquity.”
In the end, though my exit meeting with the pastor stayed cordial I found it quite deflating. This pastor had helped me at various other times in important ways, but now the knowledge I wished to share about the dangers of Calvinism was essentially regarded as false. And since I had no room to apply my gift as Christ intended that I should use it for this particular local Body, I judged it was time to move on. The various evidences I cited (Jn. 1:12, Mt. 26:26, and Is. 5) became, for the most part, unsought opportunities for my pastor to obligatorily put a Calvinistic spin on them. At one point he posed the hypothetical question as to whether I would submit to the elders’ authority (within the context of church discipline) if all the elders came to the conclusion that I was wrong (a process that appeared as though it would have stemmed from only one of the elders informing himself about my book and then reporting on it to the other elders). At length I asked in return if that is what Martin Luther should have done (i.e., does one yield one’s conscience to the leadership of men, even when such an opinion of the leadership is opposed to God)? He replied that Luther’s situation was different, for it involved church tradition, etc. I replied that I believed his own position was church-tradition based. Frankly, I am not a quick thinker on my feet and generally did not present my case nor answer as well as others would have done in such a meeting (indeed, that is one reason I wrote a book on the subject of sovereignty and wished it had been read through by this pastor). But I nevertheless warn those readers, who are more able than I at thinking on their feet when conversing with Calvinists, not to expect much from engaging church leaders who have believed in Calvinism most of their lives. I know very few persons besides myself who believed in the absolute sovereignty of God for years but then came to the opposite conclusion. Thus the situation at large does not encourage me, in fact it depresses me, and it remains a mystery to me why people, especially church leaders, seem generally content to be unmindful of the Scriptural and logical evidence against Calvinism. Indeed, it seems as though the hypothetical import of Calvinism being false were somehow less important to these Calvinist leaders than certain other priorities within their ministries, even when such import might mean that, e.g., some of the pastor’s teaching would be blasphemous. At the least, it certainly makes one wonder if the Evangelical Church is properly jealous of its own God’s reputation.
64Bultmann had a Lutheran background, Tillich had been an ordained minister in the German Lutheran Church, and Barth had been a Reformed pastor in Switzerland.
While we’re on the subject of the neoorthodoxy of Barth, let us examine briefly its dialectical methodology. Of Barth’s theology Wikipedia states:
“The relationship between Barth, liberalism and fundamentalism goes far beyond the issue of inerrancy, however. From Barth’s perspective, liberalism, as understood in the sense of the 19th century with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hegel as its leading exponents and not necessarily expressed in any particular political ideology, is the divinization of human thinking. This, to him, inevitably leads one or more philosophical concepts to become the false God, thus attempting to block the true voice of the living God. This, in turn, leads to the captivity of theology by human ideology. In Barth’s theology, he emphasizes again and again that human concepts of any kind, breadth or narrowness quite beside the point, can never be considered as identical to God’s revelation. In this aspect, Scripture is also written human language, which bears witness to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Scripture cannot be considered as identical to God’s self-revelation, which is properly only Jesus Christ. However, in his freedom and love, God truly reveals himself through human language and concepts, with a view toward their necessity in reaching fallen humanity. Thus Barth claims that Christ is truly presented in Scripture and the preaching of the church, echoing a stand expressed in his native Swiss Reformed Church’s Helvetic Confession of the 16th century.”
Thus we note that Barth, by insisting on a ‘transcendence’ of “God” that makes all human statements short of being identical to the revelation of “God,” including narrowness [of definition] quite beside the point, has subtly stated that language cannot describe God whatsoever. For (it follows) no matter how narrow, i.e., ‘atomized,’ so to speak, humans wish to understand God even in the simplest terms-Creator, Redeemer, Person, etc.-since these terms are humanly comprehendible they therefore do not describe “God.” But we note that to speak of something that is not identical in meaning based solely (or sufficiently) on its being linguistically comprehendible to humans, is to imply that humans have ‘almost meaning,’ which, readers should observe, is not to speak of meaning at all. Again, one is reminded of novelist Lloyd Douglas’ complaint of the critic who accused him of being “almost ungrammatical,” to which Douglas stated his familiarity with what grammatical was, and ungrammatical too: but what was “almost ungrammatical”? Thus Douglas saw through the ludicrous demand for the compromise that some philosophers claim is rightfully synthesis (A = non-A ). Naturally then, Barth, as a philosopher who does embrace the dialectic, plows the furrow of synthesis by dragging up muddiness on both sides of it. And so on the one hand language is compartmentalized so that ‘human language’ is defined so wholly other that it cannot describe God. And so obviously the Bible, in the Barthian view, cannot be identical to the revelation of God (i.e., describe God), since humans wrote it. (Again, by “identical” we note that Barth means deficient en masse in all of its parts, though of course he would deny that this is his definition.) Such a Barthian approach, we note, is essentially like that error of Philo (the influential, Jewish first century philosopher who derived his thought from Plato), and therefore antichrist in principle, since it regards God and man as so fundamentally different as to deny that they can practically inhabit shared realms-realms which make not only Spirit-breathed inspiration possible through a media of language comprehendible both to God and man, but the Incarnation of Christ (the Logos) as well. (Nothing would hardly seem sillier to Platonists than the idea of the Incarnation, which to them would mean the ridiculous idea of Reality became its shadowy form.)1 So while Evangelicals would admit that “humans wrote” the Bible, they contextualize that event as having taken place under the inspiration of the Spirit of God. But moving on, on the other hand Barth also claims that God nevertheless reveals himself in human concepts! For note Wikipedia’s continuing synopsis of Barth, which requires the immediate doublethink which follows, stating that “in this aspect” the human language of Scripture “bears witness…of God” (emphasis mine). But we must ask how human language (Scripture or no, as Wikipedia notes) can bear witness of God when that very human language is wholly other in meaning to the revelation of God! Indeed, doubtless Barth is forced to this other side of the dialectical rocking horse lest 1) the religious and philosophical discussion simply end then and there; and 2) it be thought that his own statement refutes itself, since the act of stating that human language cannot describe God is itself a way of partially framing the definition of God by way of negation, and therefore even in this manner is self-refuting. Therefore Barth’s long-standing complaint that the liberal, biblical criticism of the 19th century had followed Hegel to a point of embracing the complete divinization of human thinking, i.e., until there was no appreciable distinction between the mind of man and the mind of God, while true, nevertheless rings hollow in Barth. For the dialecticism of Barth, like that of Hegel, cannot be inferred by readers as having any meaning. Therefore the perceived difference between Hegel and Barth is only that!-merely an appearance of difference. In either case the reader ought to properly infer only a meaning of Zero, of nothing, because the ‘meaning’ of word symbols evoked in the reader’s mind arise only because of the words’ psychological associations. And so the deconstruction has been a fiat accompli upon the very outset of Barth’s premise. Thus in Barth’s case “Jesus Christ” becomes the term that rehearses the kind of Medievalist theology that believed that God was so ‘wholly other’ that no human description of God could properly be made, again, a statement that refutes itself [that is, insofar as it can be said (with my readers’ understanding) that dialectical systems contain statements]. So Barth fails to escape the endless Hegelian loop, since he implicitly makes the absurd claim that human concepts are wholly other in meaning to the revelation of God, a statement which demands that he would know who or what God is. The only real escape here for Barth, it seems to me, is to claim a possession of knowledge given irresistibly by the Divine which he did not initiate or willingly retain (hello, Calvinism), since it cannot be anything of human.2 But of course if that is the case then individuation of Mind is lost, and so Barth is no different than Hegel (or Calvin, for that matter) in proclaiming the divinization of man. Thus in such a case all boundaries of individuation are erased, and so the idea of the infinite Logos becoming the Second Adam is denied.
I think we may safely assume that Barth’s defenders, like Calvin’s, will attempt to refute our criticism with its own version of beneficent-sounding, post-Modern deconstruction, i.e., in the same manner we noted of Pico Iyer (see p. 209) or of the critic who thought I misrepresented Gregory Koukl (see p. 692ff). Such criticisms begin by making the opposing side suppose that both sides in the discussion share the same meaning of terms, when in fact they do not. And yet in one sense perhaps this veneer of diplomacy is wearing thin. For this would seem to explain the recent observation by Wikipedia that some critics now discount the 20th century understanding of Hegel’s philosophy as thesis–antithesis–synthesis. After all, just who did those 20th century critics think they were, invoking such absolutist terms like “thesis” and “antithesis,” rather than judge Hegel on his own terms? Ought we not to apply dialectical criticism to dialectical philosophy! And so we observe that the cat continues to chase its tail, whether in dialectical philosophy or dialectical theology. As Van Til (in effect) properly observed about dialectical systems through a consideration of their founders (if failing to note the same about his own Calvinism): each thinker, whether Hegel or Kierkegaard, accused his predecessor of not making brute fact brute enough, or contingency contingent enough. It seems to me, then, that from Barth’s defenders we are destined to hear how much we misunderstand Barth, while they seem to commit the same error that Barth accused others of, when he claimed that 19th century religious liberals had made human thought idolatrous. And if we live to see the younger generation of critics begin to take on Barth, we may expect to find them likewise feeling scandalized that neither did Barth make brute fact brute enough, or contingency contingent enough.
1 Observing Barth’s theology even closer, we see the hallmark characteristic of all progressive neoorthodoxy—for whereas the apostle John used a cultural contact point, the Logos, to go from the abstract and impersonal to the specific and personal, today’s neoorthodox theologian does the opposite—using a cultural contact that is specific and personal, i.e., the Logos as defined since John, and driving it backward toward the abstract and impersonal. In this way the neoorthodox theologian avoids the rancor of traditional arguments, like those between Calvinists and Arminians, and moves immediately to agendize whatever (esp. social) concern he feels is more important than a personal Savior, such as poverty or global warming or same sex marriage, etc. Hence God so loved the world becomes God loving equally the whole of the environmental cosmos, not primarily persons, and salvation becomes the vague goal of “bringing healing to that which is broken,” a phrase ambiguous enough to serve the needs of socialized, ecumenical theology. This new vision (not so new, really) is the result of overthrowing the historical meaning of words, and mythologizing Scripture into enough abstraction to serve the social moment. Now, note that all such conclusions arose from neoorthodoxy’s selective attack on language, claiming on the one hand that human concepts are wholly other than those which can describe God, yet also something God makes use of to explain Himself. I guess we’re just suppose to take the neoorthodox theologian’s word for it, i.e., that we have it backwards, and he front, right, and center. That is the difference-the Bible’s historical-grammatical approach as compared to his special pleading.
2 [I think this is basically what N.T. Wright (Bishop of Durham) is unwittingly after, when he talks of the possession of Torah as symbolic of the kind of possession of justification which he alleges Paul is teaching, a view, we note, which denies that man predicates his own faith, a predication which Wright implicitly derides would mean a getting into justification. No surprise to us that Wright finds that this view of possession works consistently in other alleged difficult passages.]
xliiPink, Arthur W. The Sovereignty of God. [http://www.sovereign-grace.com/pink/chapter11.htm]; Chapter 11: “Difficulties and Objections.”
xliiiSproul, p. 116.
xlivSproul, pp. 103-104.
xlvBoettner, p. 61.
xlviiBoettner, p. 67.