@brightfame52 @Kermos
*Why Calvinism is a bad thing and I reject it as false.*
I reject Calvinism for a lot of sound reasons (that I explain later on below), but I found many people gravitate towards the wrong reasons for rejecting Calvinism where in fact the Calvinist is actually more correct than they are; this muddies the waters, because then it becomes a partial confused truth, and one error trying to correct another. So first are the 2 reasons I do NOT reject Calvinism, followed by the 5 reasons I DO.
_1. Calvinism is not wrong because God does not have the right to do with his creation whatever he wants._
God is the ground and source of all being, and as such he legitimately has the official and moral right to do whatever he wants with his creation. God is not in a democracy, his people are not Americans who fight for their civil liberties to the death in the grand republic. God is a complete and unilateral monarchy, and denying him his right to do whatever he wants with no restrictions, is placing an external constraint upon God that doesn't come from himself, and so boils down to idolatry.
Thankfully our God is maximally loving, unlike the Calvinist God, and we can rest in relief that he has revealed himself as so. But never and not because he owes it to us—God does not owe us his love. This puts the obligation and demand on God from the value of creation itself, reversing the roles of Creator and created, and belittling the value of God by transferring that value into his creation itself, whereupon God becomes beholden and indebted to his creation's value: idolatry.
_2. Calvinism is not wrong because God would be unloving to allow any person into hell for a reason other than their direct free will choice._
This is a powerful motivation for many false doctrines, the demand that God meet our own sense of morality. The demand that God give us the purity and capacity to know him in and of ourselves, can only logically reduce to pride and independence from God. For any obligation placed upon God logically equates to something else being more valuable than God, and putting a moral obligation upon him. Behind the scenes of what looks like care for the lost, is really a root of rebellion and pride.
It is the reason for this that people feel God owes us. And to demand a reason from God—this is the entire plot of the book of Job, and the lesson it teaches us. To demand a reason from God, an explanation, for something we personally dislike, find distasteful, or outright immoral, is to put ourselves on the throne and God as our subject. This whole line of argument that "God is a monster if he allows X, he is evil and mean and cruel and unworthy of any worship": it boils down to rebellion.
So, we have a maximally loving God who has yet, in his sovereignty, allowed us to be born with a sin nature that does not naturally like his ways. This is the path of humility—accepting what God tells us, instead of figuring out if we like it enough and think it's okay for God to do, or makes sense. And here, in fact, is a simple path of just accepting propositions we cannot logically harmonize and do not emotionally prefer. Christ told us to come this way: deny self, be simple as a child.
Now on to the reasons I DO reject Calvinism. I used to be very intimidated by the idea of Calvinism because underneath I didn't feel 100% sure it couldn't possibly be true. This made me in practice scared of God—scared of whether I was made for his wrath. I was willing to accept God however he revealed himself, and give him the right to be whoever he wanted. But over years of prayer and study I have grown in my confidence that I no longer consider Calvinism accurately reflects election. Here are the 5 main reasons why:
_1. It makes God less loving than he is._
Just as God is completely holy, completely just and completely powerful, so God is completely loving. The argument comes that God allowing a person to be lost that he could have theoretically saved, makes God less loving than he could be. But this is a wrong definition of love. Love does not mean that God does not have any other reasons or motives for doing something that might be stronger or more important to him than the love he holds for the lost. So whatever mysterious reasons God had for allowing people to be lost, does not override the truth that God genuinely loved those lost people; and to genuinely love is defined as genuinely desiring the well-being, which cannot be true of something you create for the intent and purpose to destroy. The character of God as revealed in Scripture is meant to help us determine things that might be harder to understand, and God is love and his tender mercies over all his works.
_2. It makes God less good than he is._
Underneath all the secondary decrees and compatibilistic philoso-double speak Calvinism employs, is the unalterable logic God decrees all things. This means that however many "degrees of separation" you want to create in between the ultimate decree of God that something would be, and the enactment through external means to get to that decree, there is still underneath a chain from the decree of God to the fulfillment of God's decree that cannot logically be broken. This would indeed make God his own enemy and the author of all evil, purely by logic. Scripture tells us “the devil sows the tares," and "an enemy has done this," yet God would be the one essentially sowing the tares if Calvinism were true, the devil becoming merely God's agent. If God is any ANY way desiring ANY evil to ACTUALIZE rather than be a potential, evil is then God's primary desire, rather than secondary, and the devil is just doing God’s will, rather than being his enemy, with an opposing will. It is not being argued that God is morally obligated to be maximally good, rather by definition, God has self-defined as perfect in all his ways, and freely chosen to be maximally good, and thus, although God decreeing evil might be theoretically just and a measure of good, it cannot, by definition, be maximally good.
I believe we can make a strong cumulative logical argument from the attributes of God. I don't think any Bible-believing Christian can honestly say "God is partially X" for any other attribute and not feel a twinge of blasphemy inside—because God is perfect in all his ways, and whatever God is, is a good thing, it inevitably follows that for God to be perfect he must be each good thing to the greatest amount. Is God maximally or partially righteous? ...partially just? ...partially powerful? ...partially holy? ...partially pure? ...partially beautiful? ...partially worthy? ...partially omnipresent? ...partially self-sufficient? ...partially transcendent? ...partially infinite? ...partially faithful? ...partially perfect? Yet some don't blink an eye to claim God is not maximally loving or maximally good.
_3. It takes away all sense of true responsibility._
Now one could argue that God never meant creatures to have any responsibility, and that would be logically coherent, however Scripture clearly implies to us actual and real choices we can make, and the responsibility that befalls them. If everything I do is decreed by God before I am born, then my will cannot ever in any case be the deciding or effectual agent of my sin. This is not to argue or imply that all sin is done through the will of a human, since many sins we cannot help; but it is also to support that there is indeed some sin that is done through the will of a human, deliberate sins, and most importantly the sin that rejects the grace of God that is freely offered and well meant.
Preceding grace is taught in both Calvinism and Arminianism, the difference is only whether it is “resistible,” and everywhere we see grace being resisted in Scripture. We could theoretically accept the mere bare culpability for what is decreed through secondary means, but again this is just philoso-double speak obscuring the fact it is in the end decreed by God, and not any real or true responsibility that is born by humans. So through God's preceding grace, we can still be totally sinful, unable and depraved, and yet still affect things with free will choices as God enables us, when that grace reaches us.
_4. It is a sinful solution to the problem of evil_
It comforts me in a selfish way if God just slots everyone for salvation or damnation and I don’t have to worry about the problem of victimization or my own need to be responsible for my choices. Instead of harmonizing love with suffering, now I just backtrack evil into the character of God so I feel better about the evil he allowed since I can selfishly rest in the fact I am unconditionally chosen. I don’t have to “feel bad” about people who never hear the Gospel since God just made them all to be trash anyway, and now I never have to worry that my sinful choices might lose my salvation since I was made “as a sheep.” But Scripture does not teach that, since by nature we are children of wrath, says Paul—and we all have to come to the same Cross as the goats we have been until Christ enables us to be a sheep.
It is sinful to find our security in attempting to formulate a doctrine that disallows God to sacrifice our personal security for God's own holiness. We can rest in grace and find our security in God's promise, without needing the false security of God desiring and decreeing all evil things and lost souls. Many Calvinists defend these things with doublespeak, saying two contradicting statements, people choose freely, and God decides for them, and use a fancy word "Compatibilism." I urge them to just be logically consistent, and admit that God does not decree free will choices. Calvinism appeals to sinful desires we have for a false selfish reasons for security and an evil resolution to the problem of evil. We would rather God deliberately plan and enact evil, than that he passively allowed it to happen creating real victims, because the alternative offends us and makes us feel insecure, but if we can find more comfort in God being evil, then our sin nature will embrace it. The other sinful alternative error for dealing with this problem of delegation, is to put self-righteous goodness inside of man and insist that delegation created no real victims. This is erring on the ditch on the other side of the road, which most Calvinists call "Pelagian," but would be better described as denying the effects of original sin and promoting inherent goodness.
_5. It brings presuppositions to the Bible while denying it does._
Granted, we all have to bring presuppositions logically, but many people try to deny that fact and claim they just “believe the Bible for what it says.” All statements from the Calvinist like "free will isn't in the Bible" and "you didn't use enough Scripture verses" are just pious rhetoric assuming what the objector sets out to prove by preloading the terms free will and exegesis to be deterministic friendly; that is unless you say the Bible verses mean a certain thing you are "eisegeting" and "rationalizing," merely because you don't agree with deterministic presuppositions brought to the Scripture. Calvinism is not the only doctrine or group that does this—almost every false doctrine utilizes this bias to look pious, and you know true humility by the acknowledgement of our need for reliance on God instead of intellect, and acknowledging our capacity for self-deception.
Calvinism has a lot of good emphases, the sinfulness of man, the greatness of God's holiness, and the need and power of Christ's atonement. Where Calvinism makes a wrong turn, is deciding how God should run his world, and that it is offensive for God to put his holiness and glory above the well-being of God's creation. Ironically, this is what the Calvinists generally accuse others of doing, of being "man-centered," and making doctrines around preferences. But the truth is, Calvinism sacrifices the love of God and the holiness of God, to collapse all that God allows into God's primary desire, for the sole intent purpose of resolving offense and finding security in removing all free will. The fact that God's holiness is more important than my own personal security, and whether God makes sure I'm not a lost person but guarantees everything I selfishly want in salvation, is something my sin nature will never like or agree to. And for the reasons above I do consider Calvinism to be clouding the Gospel, although by the mercies of God their doctrinal sin can be forgiven, as in most cases.
