Calvinism and Other Pseudologies
Not that long ago, my brother and I were laying down a brick walk in front of his house, when two guys, ‘Elder’ McGilliam and ‘Elder’ Pencko,237 crossed from the far side of the street to tell us of Joseph Smith and his message about Jesus Christ. These two young men and I began to exchange our views about Christ, and while doing so I found out that ‘elders’ McGilliam and Pencko were only 19 years old. Thus, in a few aspects and by Old Testament standards, they wouldn’t have even been considered full adults, since a man didn’t go to war unless he was at least 20, and because God didn’t hold anyone responsible for refusing His command to go into the land of Canaan who was less than that age. At any rate, I felt sorry for them. Here in New Jersey they were far away from their families, the one ‘elder’ having kin in Idaho, and the other in California. What a shame, I thought, that the Mormon Church would limit their family contacts to four times a year during their missionary work, yet designate them ‘elders’ before reaching full, mature adulthood (as though on the one hand they had no wisdom to know how often they should visit their families, but on the other hand be given a church title that suggested such discernment).
Anyhow, I stayed away from the easy ad hominem arguments that could have been leveled against the ‘glass-looking’ Smith.238 Instead, I focused on Smith’s translation of certain hieroglyphic writings on some papyri that he bought in 1835. Gleason Archer in his book, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, tells it best:
Most interesting is the recently exposed fraud of the so-called Book of Abraham, part of the Mormon scripture known as The Pearl of Great Price. This was allegedly translated from an ancient Egyptian papyrus found in the mummy wrappings of certain mummies which had been acquired by a certain Michael H. Chandler. In 1835 Joseph Smith became very much interested in these papyrus leaves, which he first saw in Kirtland, Ohio, on July 3, and arranged for the purchase of both mummies and manuscripts. Believing he had divinely received the gift of interpreting ancient Egyptian, he was delighted to find that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham himself, whose signature he had personally inscribed in the Egyptian language. In 1842, Smith published his translation under the title, “The Book of Abraham” in Times and Seasons. He even included two drawings of the pictures or vignettes appearing in the manuscript, and interpreted the meaning of these illustrations: Abraham sitting upon the throne of Pharaoh and the serpent with walking legs who tempted Eve in Eden.239 For many years this collection of papyri was lost, but somehow they (or else a duplicate set of them from ancient times) were presented to the Mormon Church by the Metropolitan Art Museum of New York City on November 27, 1967. This made the translation skill of Joseph Smith susceptible to objective verification. The unhappy result was that earlier negative verdicts of scholars like Theodule Devaria of the Louvre, and Samuel A.B. Mercer of Western Theological Seminary, and James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago, and W. F. Flinders Petrie of London University (who had all been shown Smith’s facsimiles) were clearly upheld by a multitude of present-day Egyptologists. Their finding was that not a single word of Joseph Smith’s alleged translation bore any resemblance to the contents of this document.
‘Elders’ McGilliam and Pencko were unaware of these developments, but the idea that The Pearl Of Great Price had been proven fraudulent didn’t seem to matter much to them. I also told them how Smith’s claim of a blood relation between Native Americans and the Jewish race had been proven false by modern DNA testing, and that their own scholars, in fact, were now scrambling for some explanation. This too seemed not to faze them. Finally, I asked them why Jesus had said He would build His Church but then allegedly waited 1800 years before doing it through Joseph Smith. Unfortunately, that argument didn’t seem to impact their thinking either. What was certain about these fellows, however, especially in ‘elder’ McGilliam, was a “burning in the bosom” of the Mormon message, i.e., the Smith-approved test of truth for anyone who might possibly doubt Smith’s word that an angel had shown him some mysterious golden plates buried in the ground on a rural farm in New York State (which historians note occurred during Smith’s ‘money-digging’ phase. Apparently, God had gone upscale since His Old Testament days of stone tablets.) And so I talked to the ‘elders’ while they put their particular spin on the Bible. “Jesus is a created being,” they told me. When I countered that John chapter 1 says that apart from Christ nothing was made that was made, they countered with their own claim. “That just refers to the things of the universe,” replied ‘Elder’ McGilliam. And so it went. By interjecting thoughts without any textual evidence, ‘Elder’ McGilliam showed his rookie partner of five-weeks on the job how to hold forth an argument with little more reason than the ‘biblical’ additions of Smith’s internally corroborated writings. That, and with a “burning in the bosom.”
I tell this incident to show how those who want to find another meaning in words will find another meaning. In fact, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) is currently reinterpreting its own scriptures. And so proceeds the ironic element in the Mormon Church—i.e., the LDS’s historical revisionism that has widened beyond the Bible to now include the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith. Apparently, sometimes even the revisionists are subject to being revised. Because the latest DNA evidence recently showed zero connection between the Jews, a tribe of whom Smith alleged had immigrated to America where they became the progenitors of the American Indians, LDS scholars are now reinterpreting Smith’s writings. Under one explanation, America is now Central America, and the Jewish tribe must have been so small that their DNA was swallowed up in the process of intermarriage with the indigenous population. While the LDS has not adopted this explanation as its official church position, there are links from the LDS official website to other sites supporting this revision of interpretation.lxv The effect of reinterpreting Smith’s writings has effectively placed Mormon apologetics into an area beyond knowing. Indeed, this appeal to mystery is what false theologies and ideologies always seek to do. Thus in the 1830s Smith first sought to place his ‘vision’ in the then unknowable realm of Egyptian hieroglyphics where it could not be tested. Today, 170 years later, the LDS employs the same method to claim that all the DNA evidence that would have proven Smith’s writings was irretrievably swallowed up in Central America’s indigenous population, and so don’t bother looking for it.
The methodology of mystical theologies or philosophies, exampled here in the LDS, is always the same. Whenever the fictional glue is threatened that holds together all the parts, a call is put out for a deeper irrationality. America has witnessed a number of these pseudologies, both religious and non-religious. For example, much later and elsewhere in America, the same kind of revisionism happened to the theory of evolution in the late 1970s, when the Harvard evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, anteed up to the fact (despite his colleagues) that the fossil record was absent the plethora of transitions evolutionists had promised since 1859. The evolutionary hypothesis was itself now evolving, as the original theory succumbed to another theory in the survival of the fittest. Evolution, claimed Gould, apparently happened in sporadic bursts. So whereas the theory of evolution had claimed for 120 years that evolution happened so slowly it couldn’t be observed, in the 1970s it was being claimed that evolution happened so fast it couldn’t be observed. But of course, it still took the same amount of eons, so that modern and post-modern man could hardly expect to actually witness an evolutionary event. Thus, like the LDS, evolutionists have likewise tried to put its ‘truths’ beyond knowing and therefore beyond testability. What is left in such cases for the follower of a Joseph Smith or a Stephan Jay Gould is “a burning in the bosom,” whether now propagated by 19-year old Mormon missionaries beating suburbia’s streets, or students-turned educators who remember listening to a 1970s Harvard professor lecturing in an Ivy League auditorium about ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ In the end it’s all about faith, even for the atheist.
This book has tried to show that Calvinism’s belief in the absolute sovereignty of God forms one of these mystical ideologies. But the difference is this: Calvinism is a false ideology that resides in the true Church. As Christian radio host Hank Hanegraaff has said, “[Calvinism] is an in-house debate.” Even Hanegraaff and his (now deceased) father had disagreed with each other about the issue. And indeed the question remains as to why many Calvinists are true Christians and devoted followers of Christ despite their apologetic, since their betimes apologetic about their theological distinctives as betimes profession defines God and man in biblically heretical terms.240 Perhaps it’s simply the kind of disconnect from their faith all Christians tend to have in one area or another because 1) the Body of Christ is not working with 100% (interdependent) efficiency under Christ to achieve the edifying of believers unto full maturity, and, of course, because 2) our own sinfulness individually hinders us. Presumably, at least most Evangelical Calvinists really do accept in their heart the true biblical definitions of God and man, and so are justified in their profession of faith because the Holy Spirit is bearing witness with their new nature that ‘God’ is who the Bible truly says He is, even while in the midst of such profession such Calvinists alternately follow their old nature as their double-mindedness professes ‘God’ in Calvinistically, i.e., heretical, terms. Therefore both true and false definitions are in operation in the course of a verbal profession, and thus do Evangelical Calvinists exist in that dangerous state of double-mindedness, a condition which the apostle James indicated was a position conceivably occupiable by the Christian. And yet if we would be honest, each of us is probably double-minded about some truth in the Bible to some degree or another, even while (ironically) we find it difficult to live up to the truth that is plain to us.
At any rate, the Calvinistic doctrine of an all-sovereign God should be understood as paralleling other pseudologies (false ideologies and/or theologies) in its desire to change language and avoid testability. Thus, in the attempt to explain a good God who has ordained an imperfect world, Calvinists have placed their fundamental propositions into the realm of mystery and therefore beyond provability. Again, this appeal to the unknowable is the hallmark of all mystical ideologies (such as LDS theology and evolutionary theory). To see better how this process involving mysticism works, we will now look further into some parallels between Calvinism and certain other pseudologies.
Existentialism
The gist of Existentialism is that a person comes into being through an act of the will. Therefore the worst thing for a man is to fail to act. Secular Existentialism, however, does not believe there is any real (ultimate and therefore informing) truth to discover, so the act of the will takes place in a moral vacuum.241 For example, suppose I see an old woman slowly crossing a busy street using her umbrella as a cane. As an act of the will I might decide to 1) go over and escort her safely to the far side of the street, or 2) go over and take away her umbrella and hit her over the head with it. In a meaningless world it does not matter what I choose, only that I choose in order that my being emerges from the Void. The question as to why a man should be bothered about his being in a purposeless universe is never answered by the secular Existentialists. It simply remains a mystery why anyone should act at all. Apparently, the moral purpose of existence itself is being itself, and that is supposed to be enough motivation for the person. The idea of pursuing objective truth through the Bible or by seeking God is dismissed entirely.
The connection between Existentialism and Calvinism is an interesting one. Calvinism too, cannot define moral content in any meaningful way. For example, in the statement, “God is good” the term ‘good’ is defined as everything God ordains in the world according to His good pleasure, which is every thing (and phenomena) in the world. In fact, Christians are told they ought to applaud God for it. Yet as one Christian disdainfully put the matter of Calvinism in a nutshell, ‘Whatever is, one bows down to it.’ As noted at the beginning of this book, this includes all the animus of human experience, including Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, religions that oppose Christianity, and whatever other atrocities and contradictions history may offer. The term ‘good,‘ then, includes all of these things, because all of these things have occurred in history, and God has ordained all of history. My point, then, is that the Calvinist is hardly concerned with what God does, just that He does. God is thus established by the good and bad morality implied in ordaining all of history, but is vindicated by simply acting in the world. God’s activity in the world is the main thing in Calvinism—this is always the chief concern of the Calvinist if you listen to him closely. If we raise the objection to the Calvinist that his theology means God actively determines the reprobate acts of the worst men, our argument falls on deaf ears. We are told that Deity is an all-sovereign God who controls everything and that we cannot question Him—end of argument. Any sense of dilemma about what we must thus infer about God’s holy character is brushed aside, as though the supreme view to behold is that God is always justified in all He does. When all the arguments and biblical passages have finally been put away at the end of the day between the Calvinist and the Free-willer, God acting in the world is (incredibly) the only defense the Calvinist has really offered.
We should not be surprised, then, that Calvinism is so attractive even to the Christian. Even as believers who sometimes walk according to the flesh, we often like to sin by believing the wrong thing, and sometimes we still want to believe some of the lies we once believed as former members of the world. Sadly, many are tricked into dressing up Christianity so that God and morality are so indeterminate that they are retained in name only. As Christians, this is our current apologetic to the world. This is the first line of explanation we offer to the unbeliever when he presses upon us the question about why God would decree suffering in the world. We offer him an Existential explanation dressed up in Christianese. We try to sidestep the question and tell him God loves him. If pressed further we give a gentle shrug of the shoulders and explain that somehow God is not so much allowing it as He is controlling it for His own ends which cannot be understood. As this is the essence of our apologetic to the world, the question must be asked—what rational person should accept such a faith? Indeed, what rational person is going to think our explanation makes man a sinner, and not God a sinner?
Catholicism
Personally speaking, Catholicism commands my respect in many ways in which Existentialism does not. At a certain social level the best of Catholicism is humanely decent, quite unlike the betimes Existentialist’s narcissistic emphasis upon himself (an indulgent viewpoint technically denied by the Existentialist but one which we nevertheless observe in him). The Catholic Church’s commitment to a certain integrity was something I observed firsthand while a graduate student at a formerly Jesuit-run university I attended. Of course, no culture is perfect where university life is considered—there were a great many Catholic students, for example, who did their duty by the Mass before going out to party hard on a Saturday night. But it was easy to have a certain profound respect for the university’s professors. Furthermore, where one might have expected the Church of Rome in recent years to begin caving in to the pressure of the liberal West with symbolic gestures conceding pieces of theological territory, it has refused to do so and has acted in proper deference to the worst of American legislation regarding laws supporting abortion and gay ‘marriage.’ “At least the Catholics were fighting it,” wrote Francis Schaeffer about the legalization of abortion in Whatever Happened to the Human Race (co-authored with then-future Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop).Schaeffer addedthat, because Protestants were so slow in responding to Roe v. Wade in the early years following the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, there would have been no pro-life movement in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision had it not been for the Catholic Church.
And yet the Catholic Church has had its problems with holding to biblical authority. Luther, of course, was right to fault the Catholic Church’s belief that men could literally buy their way into heaven through the ‘good work’ of buying indulgences. This challenge went to the deeper issue of who had the authority to speak on matters that affected a man’s salvation. Consequently, when the Reformation emerged from the Catholic Church it did so upon the two proper bases for which it would subsequently become famous: sola scriptura and sola fide (scripture alone, and faith alone). Both Luther and Calvin denied that a man’s salvation was the combined result of grace and works, and they thought to strengthen this claim by saying that God alone had provided man the necessary faith to believe Him. Therefore, as a pendulum reaction against the strong sway of the Catholic Church’s emphasis on works, the Reformers stressed God’s complete role in the salvation of the individual. This way (thought Calvin and Luther) a man could not think he had done something boastworthy, even if he had merely believed.
Calvinists today continue to embrace this idea, and we have already rebutted this particular point of Reformed theology in an earlier chapter. But what needs to be observed additionally here is the similarity of method used by both the Reformers and the Catholic Church. Both use dialecticism to argue certain points regarding man’s salvation. Consider first the Catholic Church. Rome teaches that God’s grace and man’s works synergistically work together to effect his atonement. However, because Paul says that salvation is of grace apart from works, the Catholic emphasis on God’s grace and man’s works are antithetical principles (even as light is to darkness, and righteousness is to unrighteousness). To illustrate why grace and works cannot synergistically work together, consider Christ’s statement about the two commandments which Christ said fulfilled all the law. The first and great commandment is to love God with all of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. Suppose, then, that a man fails to love God with all of his heart or soul or mind or strength at one point during one particular day of his life. The best he can do during the rest of the week, or even the rest of his life, is to love God at every subsequent instant during all his remaining days with all of his heart, mind, soul, and strength. This would mean the man would live perfectly after the one time he had sinned. God’s standard of obedience, however, demands total perfection at all times. How, then, can a man atone for his own sin if he has sinned even once? The answer, of course, is that he cannot, and that is why he needs a Savior. Most people who trust in their works believe that God will look at some of the good things they have done and decide that these positive works make up for the bad things they have thought about or done. But can they really make up for sin? To do so would mean living more than perfectly during one’s remaining days in order to make up the slack. And because it is irrational to say that one can love God with more than all of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, a man cannot do good works to atone for even one of his sins. The idea, then, that a man can atone for his sin is the irrational element in the Catholic religion. It says that a man can atone for his own shortcomings, when clearly the man cannot do more than to love God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength after he sins.
But consider how dialecticism also appears within the Reformed view of salvation. It is one where God is said to impart a ‘new nature’ to the man, and that upon this basis the man trusts God. The term ‘new nature’ is not something I have ever seen clearly defined by the Calvinist, though it is the key to their entire doctrine regarding man’s salvation. It is described as the ‘regeneration’ of the man’s desire, but plainly the man’s desire has been wholly negated in order to accommodate God’s complete change in the man. What then is left of the man or his desire? Nothing whatsoever. To say, then, that God imparts a ‘new nature’ so that a man may (rather, must) trust Him, is a word game in which nothing more nor less is being said than that God chooses our choice in the matter of ‘our’ salvation, since the man and his desire have been negated. Thus, the Calvinist asks us to doublethink that God’s implanted desire in the man in whom he negates desire can also be called the man’s own desire. This way God can be called all-sovereign, yet in such a way so that the ‘man’ can be said to trust God by his ‘own’ will.
Hence, the apologetic of man’s salvation, technically speaking, is not more rationally expressed in Calvinism than in Catholicism. Furthermore, such a redefining of essential terms shows Calvinism to be a false gospel, a man-constructed soteriology and thus a gospel of works created after the principles of the world, and not according to Christ. This is the great similarity between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Neither movement made any advances toward rationality in the essentials of their apologetics. Whereas Catholicism made man’s works equal to God’s grace, the Reformation made man’s faith a work. As the Reformation apologetic developed, it also rendered meaningless other terms, such as ‘God,’ ‘man,’ ‘good,’ and ‘evil.’ The question remains, then, as to what moral authority the Calvinist has, that it can reprove the Catholic for the latter’s amalgam of God’s grace and man’s works? In other words, where is the rationality in Calvinism that makes absolute distinctions possible, so that the Calvinist might reprove the Catholic? It is nowhere present. The Calvinist242 would only be throwing stones in the same glass house of dialecticism in reproving the Catholic. For example, how effectively can the Calvinist say to the Catholic, Though you may claim that my belief in God’s total sovereignty and human freedom is only stating the impossibility of ‘God choosing our choices,’ I don’t see it that way; rather, your doctrine of grace combined with works is what is actually illogical (?) How effectively, then? Not at all effectively. And so the Calvinist remains without an effective apologetic to win over the Catholic whenever he urges a personal receiving ofChrist by faith (so called) alone. One wonders how evangelization of the Catholic unto true salvation can ever be very effective, as long as (the many) Protestant Evangelicals who are following Calvinism ask Catholics to exchange their version of the dialectic for one of their own. Rather, only Christ as presented biblically and rationally can really challenge a man’s heart and mind.
Victimization
Probably many of us know someone who suffers from acute anxiety or some other form of mental difficulty. Or maybe that someone is us. At times, many such people are prone to feel they have little, if any, control over how they feel or think. As far as most of the medical community is concerned, the whole of the person’s problem is often reduced to a bio-chemical explanation apart from any spiritual consideration. This is because the science of psychology has traditionally been rooted in the evolutionary assumption that man is a physical, not spiritual, being. Though man has thoughts and emotions, a man and his mind are regarded by many psychiatrists as essentially physical products, and so the brain is understood and treated upon the same bio-chemical foundation that many professionals believe constitute the whole of the man.
The problem, then, with medicating away the symptoms in the mental sufferer is that if often fails to uncover the root problem of anxiety. Medication certainly has a positive role to play in the treatment of mental suffering. We would never deny that. Yet medication alone may also mask the real question about why the person has anxiety. Almost never is prolonged anxiety understood as a choice. The person’s anxiety may stem from feelings of vulnerability, or prolonged anger, or fear, or frustration at unresolved circumstances in life, etc., but anxiety is often diagnosed by the professional as the result of outside biological forces. Unfortunately, instead of challenging the person, modern psychology tends to commiserate with them by assigning their condition to a disease over which the patient has little or no control apart from medication.
Evangelicalism, too, makes use of this same methodology. Yes, we preach against sin, but we also urge one another to understand the pressure of being human to a point where we sometimes tacitly excuse one another. The Evangelical Church has in fact become psychologized by the vast influence of modern psychology. We often excuse believers because we feel sorry for them in their circumstances, sometimes merely allowing them to take ownership of their problems without really taking responsibility for them. More often than not, the Church just allows ‘problem people’ to assume the victim posture. Life is tough, and for us to approach the oppressed with “cutting them some slack” may make us feel less accountable, should we find ourselves in similar circumstances on some future day of weakness. This tendency to “cut people slack” has a merciful ring to it, but God never administers mercy to the Christian without making clear his or her responsibility to repent (”Go and sin no more.”).
Consequently, e.g., people with long-standing drug addictions in the Church are often handled with repeated ‘interventions’ or a series of Christian center rehab visits whenever their addiction kicks in. These may be sincere attempts to reform the addict, but they are not always in consort with a strong model of church discipline based on Matthew 18, which carries with it the greatest chance of success. Too often in today’s Church a kind of milk-toast response has come to the fore. It has grown out of the Church’s acceptance of modern psychology in which anxiety, addictions, and other destructive habits are given labels of illness (or at least regarded as illness) instead of being fully granted their status as sin. The result is an Evangelical posturing away from the old, harsh-sounding fundamentalists, who, if they had a more biblical model of discipline, nevertheless had the reputation of putting the church’s reputation ahead of the person.
The similarity of victim theory with Calvinism should be fairly obvious. Viewed from the perspective that God foreordains all things, people are obviously puppets who have no control over their lives. They cannot be expected to change their behavior, since a greater outside Force is manifesting itself through them. This total governance must be true of entire nations, as well, as a simple extension of what Reformed apologist B.B. Warfield stated, i.e., that “God creates the very thoughts and intents of the soul.” And so, presumably, half the time the average Calvinist will urge the person of ‘will’ to repent of his sin, and the rest of the time assume the sufferer is experiencing exactly what God has decreed for him. How a person is to make sense of his suffering when exposed to such a theologically schizophrenic view of God’s role in his suffering, is anybody’s guess. The sufferer’s idea of his own responsibility will almost certainly be skewed in the midst of such ambiguity.
Multiculturalism
Some years ago ABC Television ran a Barbara Walters special called, “Heaven: Where Is It? How Do We Get There?”lxvi Interviews of dozens of religious leaders, as well as scientists and atheists, yielded the inevitable crop of varying beliefs. Among the many persons interviewed was an Islamic fundamentalist—a failed suicide bomber whom Walters visited inside a high-security Israeli prison. The young man told Walters that he would have had 20+ virgins243 in the afterlife had his suicide mission been successful. (We will return to the example of this Islamic fundamentalist in a moment.) Another interviewee was evangelical pastor, Ted Haggard, who finally admitted after some dogged badgering from Walters that he couldn’t be certain she was going to heaven without Jesus.244 I think this interview would have been more interesting if Haggard had asked Walters if she believed in heaven, and if not, in what did she believe—for if she did not believe in heaven why bother with investigating other persons’ beliefs in heaven or investigating anything else?
Presumably Walters, who professes not to have any real religious beliefs besides praying for safety when boarding an airplane, embraces by default some form of multiculturalism. This seems to be today’s pop-culture, default answer for those who have no particular religious views. Among other things, such persons tend to embrace moral relativism. The great attraction toward multiculturalism in America today is the idea that everyone can be accommodated. At least, that’s how multiculturalism works in theory. The reality, of course, is much different. Consider, for example, how the Christian defines ideal existence compared to the multiculturalist. For the Christian, ideal existence is living someday with God in heaven, worshipping Him, loving his neighbor as himself, and doing God’s work (whatever the nature of that future work might be). For the multiculturalist, ideal existence is equally valuing all cultures and cultural ideas. However, the real spirit of multiculturalism never seeks to stop at merely the regional or national level, but embraces all cultures of all countries. Furthermore, nations are merely the corporate groupings of individuals; thus, to be most tolerant in the truest sense of ‘multiculturalism’ would presumably mean embracing every individual viewpoint in the world and granting it equal valuation, since each culture is merely the adding together of individual viewpoints. Ideal existence, then, for the true multiculturalist, would be to accept the world as it is. In other words, one could not cast a vote in favor of one political candidate or party over another and be a true multiculturalist, because to cast a vote would be to show prejudice in favor of one viewpoint over another and thus align oneself with one sub-group of culture over another. Furthermore, even if a person didn’t vote but merely complained about somebody in regard to any matter, they would not be acting as a true multiculturalist, since they would be showing a prejudice against someone else’s particular attitude about something. And even if a person managed never to complain about anyone, he could still not embrace all the viewpoints of all individuals. Some people, for example, have despaired to the point of suicide or have attempted suicide because they believed life was meaningless. How does the multiculturalist embrace that position while at the same time embrace the majority viewpoint that life is worth living? The premise of multiculturalism, then, is impossible to satisfy, since it is irrational to suggest that anyone can grant equal valuation to opposite viewpoints. Thus, it is not possible for Barbara Walters (or anyone else) to live life without having preferred views that exclude the viewpoints of some people at some time.
But let’s step out of the theoretical and into the practical. If the whole machinery behind Walters’s TV special is any example, it shows that TV journalism and journalists are just as opinionated as anyone else. For example, no one heard Walters say to the failed suicide bomber at the end of her interview, “Well, you know, I really think your viewpoint and the viewpoint of fundamental Islamic radicalism is as valid as anyone else’s.” Rather, she admitted the interview was “very frightening and very sad” and was dismayed that the Muslim interviewee could be so filled with “hatred and ignorance.” Later, she found a different interviewee’s comments “funny” and “charming.”245 So while no one really believes in multiculturalism, veteran reporters like Walters must find it terribly handy to have around when interviewing religious people stuck in the kind of exclusivity of which they, as journalists, imagine they are not a part.246
The connection, then, between Calvinism and (theoretical) multiculturalism is the approval of the world as it is. The Calvinist always says (at least while temporarily in the forward rock of the rocking horse) that God foreordains the world and all the events it contains according to His own good pleasure. Though it is a mystery how the world as it is reflects God’s ultimate sovereignty, we are told we have the Bible’s assurance on the matter, or so say Calvinists like Jerry Bridges, who assure us that “all the decisions of rulers, kings, and parliaments; and all the actions of their governments, armies, and navies serve His will.lxvii Their hearts and minds are as much under His control as the impersonal physical laws of nature….lxviii God controls the hand of both the mad tyrant and the careless officer.”lxix Thus, as Bridges states it, God must in every sense approve of the world as it is if one is to remain true to Calvinistic principles, or else God is not really sovereign.
Eastern Mysticism
From multiculturalism to Eastern Mysticism is but a few small steps. Already the multiculturalist realizes that to prefer one view over another is “bad” (that is, insofar as the multiculturalist can believe that anything is bad). Indeed, in a world where equal consideration and valuation is attempted, nothing is thought to be ultimately good or bad. In terms of value, then, everything is really One. As long as people fail to understand the spirit of multiculturalism (I assume here the persona of a multiculturalist), they will mistakenly think there are differences in human expression and behavior. But though there appear to be differences, there really are no differences. Rather, there is only an illusion of difference. Definition itself is the enemy, since it makes people think in terms of difference instead of the One. Thus, to struggle against the One is to be in disharmony with the Universal. (O.k., end of persona!)
Calvinism, too, like Eastern mysticism, avoids the moral dimension at all costs, defining irrationally key subjects like God, man, good, and evil. For example, we have already seen how the phrase, “God is good,” is meaningless in a Calvinistic paradigm. Since God is said to ordain everything in the universe, including all the acts of human decency and brutality, the term ‘good’ is meaningless. Furthermore, since ‘good’ is meaningless, nothing is really being stated about the subject of the sentence, i.e., ‘God.’ Thus, ‘God’ cannot be properly posited, i.e., said to exist, since no description of ‘Him’ is really being made. In order to posit God, man, good, or evil, Christians must understand that true theology insists on definite and conclusive statements. But Calvinism does not provide the Christian with such definitive views. (In fact, all that Calvinism is, is the appearance of meaning.) Just the fact that Calvinists sense no real dilemma in ascribing to God all the activity of the world shows what little appreciation they have for Difference. Hence, terms like ‘God,’ ‘man’, ‘good,’ and ‘evil’ are indistinctly ‘maintained,’ and so there remains only an illusion of content. For the Calvinist the two principles of the Westminster Confessions are ultimately treated as one and the same expression, that is, when the totality of their arguments are considered. The Calvinist affirms each principle which he later denies, and then denies his denials so that he can reaffirm his dialectical principles again in a cycle of deferred ‘definitions.’ It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Calvinists, when arguing for the absolute sovereignty of God, are encouraging a kind of ‘Christian’ Nirvana experience through meditation of the One (’God’) who comprehends all thought and experience.
Problem of the One and the Many
Now, I am not saying that those who betimes profess to believe in Calvinistic principles are not saved nor at the same level in their overall spiritual understanding as the followers of the LDS, Existentialism, Eastern mysticism, etc. Rather, I am saying that the irrationality found in Calvinistic apologetics is not fundamentally different than other expressions of irrational, non-Christian thought, and further, that such irrationality has inflicted untold damage upon the Church and the world. If we grant that Calvinists (or at least most Calvinists) believe in Christ despite their Calvinism—and I think we probably may—we must assume they are double-minded about their spiritual convictions.
At any rate, this similarity between the irrationality of Calvinism and Eastern mysticism is especially evident when we consider one of the biggest challenges to any ideological system—the problem of the One and the Many. Along with the problem of evil and the problem of epistemology (How do we know that we know?), the problem of the One and the Many remains a chief concern for philosophers and theologians. That is, how are the individual things of the world related to one another? For on the one hand it would seem that individual things are isolated things unto themselves, and that we presume a unity where there is none. On the other hand if everything is One, how do we account for individual things? The answer, according to Eastern philosophy, is that there is only One, and that therefore the perception of individual things is but an illusion. The act of meditating upon the One will bring the devotee into this fact so that he is in harmony with the Universal. Thus, contemplation of the One helps the mind to rid itself of itself, so that the end result is a proper absorption into the One. It seems plain to me that the underlying motive for many persons in espousing the One is to deny their creaturely status. Indeed, in this way they implicitly make for themselves an equal claim to being ‘Deity.’
Now Christianity is likewise faced with this same dilemma of how to demonstrate a unity in the particulars. Yet as Reformed thinker Cornelius Van Til properly pointed out, the problem of the One and the Many is solved by the Trinity. Within one Godhead are three distinct Persons, and therefore we have unity and plurality existing in harmony together in a way in which neither the unity of the One nor the plurality of the Many jeopardizes the Other. But to Van Til’s understanding we should add another fact to this model. Within the Trinity is also the explanation of how God is good, and how choice is ever present. Presumably, at any point in God’s eternal, historical past, One of the Persons of the Godhead could have dissented against the other Two (or Two have dissented against the One).247 Christ, for example, prayed to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Not my desire, but thine be done,” thus showing a different desire and will possible. Later that same night, Christ told Peter that He could have called for more than 12 legions of angels for rescue from the soldiers. Had Christ not decided to undergo the baptism of his death, how then would the Scripture have been fulfilled (i.e., that Messiah would die 62 weeks [biblically understood as 62 x 7, or 434 years (Dan. 9:26) after the going forth of the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem])? The possibility of Christ acting out of consort with the plan of the Father was thus a very real possibility, according to Christ’s own testimony about His potential choices. The potential for evil has thus always been present with God, since there are separate wills able to be expressed among the Persons of the Trinity. As to the question of whether all the Persons of the Trinity would ever together act contrary to their past ideals, the answer is given in Numbers 23:19—”God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.” (Thus, though God theoretically could deny Himself, He has not, does not, and shall not.) For the issue for the Persons of the Trinity is not just that Each acts in consort with the Others, but that together the Persons maintain the same eternal and righteous ideals of the Trinity, because in the end Each chooses to do so, not because Each cannot do so.248
I have to admit, though, that it seems strange to me to see how Van Til so admirably solves the problem of the One and the Many without seeing in his own Calvinism an implied Monism which at the same time overthrows the understanding of the One and the Many. I cannot help but again be reminded of Sproul’s statement that though he (Sproul) had seen many clever attempts to solve Calvin’s dialecticism (and therefore the problem of evil), he had as yet found no truly satisfying answer. We would agree, and press forward the conclusion that there can be no answer for the problem of evil when a man supposes that truth has something in common with irrationality. God must be separate from man, and good must be separate from evil if the Bible’s truths are to be maintained and have effect. Conversely, an irrational apologetic does nobody good, and thus one despairs at Jerry Bridges’s statement that the [absolute] sovereignty of God is found on virtually every page of the Bible.lxx Rather, we maintain that the Bible is not so represented on any of its pages. Only a God who is distinct in His creatorship, personhood, and holiness can save man. Only an upright God who is distinct from sinful man can judge him. Let us be done, then, with definitions that go nowhere except to remind us of the contradiction of bizarre human reasoning, i.e., a false reasoning which helps to form that contradiction of sinners which the Bible says Christ endured [not for His own sake, but for the Father’s sake (to our benefit)]—i.e., our very contradiction which led Him to a cross He despised as an aberrant experience from the original and perfect plan of God.
237 Not their real names
238 Smith engaged regularly in ‘money-digging,’ an activity somewhat common during his day. It involved pretending to divine the location of buried treasure. Smith was convicted of a “glass-looking” incident in the 1830s in which he was accused of swindling money from a farmer. Isaac Hale, the future father-in-law of Smith at the time of Smith’s ‘vision’ of the angel Moroni, responded once to a newspaper editor’s request for information about Smith with a notarized statement (accompanied by an affidavit by his son, Alva, stating that what his father said was “correct and true”). Hale told of Smith’s claim of translating a wonderful book of plates in the same manner he used in money-digging—placing a stone in one’s hat and holding the hat over one’s face.
239 Ironically, the illustration that Smith claimed represented Abraham, the father of all the faithful and living, turned out to be Osiris, the Egyptian god of the Dead.
240 Again, the true Christian who is a Calvinist expresses in some proportion truth, lie, truth, lie, etc., ad nauseam in this life regarding his Calvinistic apologetic. Taking the Calvinist’s statements together would seem to form a meaningless confession to the world. Yet God is greater than the believer’s heart when it condemns him, and so the Calvinist believer may be regarded as alternately expressing truth during those times when his confession occurs on what would seem to be the backward rock of his rocking horse theology, since his confession’s emphasis, during these times, is on man’s freedom, that is, if he means (as God would judge it) to confess it unqualifyingly, i.e., non-dialectically in a way in which he has abandoned rocking horse theology, thus implying a God who allows such freedom (thereby defining Deity according to a biblically rational definition). During these times of unqualified support for man’s freedom (presuming there are such times as God would judge them so to be) then profession is being made to that fact. Our contention in this book about the meaninglessness of terms in Calvinism is this: i.e., by “meaningless” we mean the impossibility for people to infer meaning upon hearing the Calvinist express his theology in terms that condemns the Calvinist’s heart.
241 It should be noted that ‘Christian’ Existentialism has the same essential problem as secular Existentialism in finding meaning apart from the Self. Christian Existentialists, who take their cue from Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy, can only assume by a leap of personal faith that there is reality in the Christian faith and that God is truly good. This is an essential denial of Paul’s statement in Romans 1 that God’s power and munificent nature are, in fact, objectively demonstrated in creation and known by man.
242 Again, here, as throughout the book, by the term ‘Calvinist’ I generally mean a person in the instance(s) of espousing primarily the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God (i.e., that all causes are divine, not secondary), and secondarily the theological distinctives of Calvinism (though, even if he be a believer, he does so while at present condemning his heart.)
243 I believe an exact number over 20 was given by the Islamic terrorist, but I don’t remember it, having heard that detail but once on a radio segment about Walter’s project.
244 Why any Christian leader would say he was not certain if one would go to heaven without Jesus ought to disturb any believer in Christ.
245 source: www.belief.net
246 Thus, Walters, like so many others, never thinks very critically about her own views, but simply gives lip service to some form of relativistic, pop philosophy which she selectively applies to her own personal advantage.
247 —or all three Persons of the Godhead against God’s historical position.
248 While Titus 1:2 tells us that God cannot lie, this does not refer to an actual inability under every conceivable circumstance for God to lie. Rather, God cannot [Gr. lit. powers (wills) not to] lie because He is set determinedly toward exercising His will to tell the truth presently (as he has always done in the past and, we may assume, shall do so in the future). Thus, because God is set determinedly toward a truthful direction He cannot also be set toward a lying direction. Thus the inability of God to lie spoken of in Titus 1:2 is a willful inability, i.e., “God powers not lying.” Note: Here and elsewhere, where I take the liberty of describing the Persons of the Trinity as “They” instead of “He,” etc. (to advance the thought of Each Person’s theoretically possible and separate intention), I trust it will be understood for argument’s sake why I have done this, instead of adopting the biblical nomenclature of the corporate One.
lxv [http://www.lds.org/newsroom/mistakes/0,15331,3885-1-18078, 00.html].
lxvi Phillips, Rebecca. “Heaven Is a Place Where You Are Happy.” [www.beliefnet.com/story/181/story_18118_1.html].
lxvii Spiegel, p. 76.
lxviii Spiegel, p. 84.
lxix Spiegel, p. 88.
lxx Bridges, p. 18.