Calvinism from Calvin himself
Once you buy into the notion that before he made the human family God purposed to choose a minority of his children that they might have eternal life with him you have made up your mind that Jesus came to save only that minority. You cannot have Jesus coming to do the will of his Father and at the same time coming to save those the Father eternally rejected. It's that simple!
When you've bought into that notion and you're asked, "How does it come that some people obey the gospel and some don't?" you have to fall back on the claim that God eternally rejected some people. You can't have those that God eternally rejected obeying the gospel for manifestly the door has eternally been shut on them—the gospel isn't for them! [It's worse than that but that's another story for another time.]
Once you've bought into this Augustinian/Calvinistic notion you can't say that the rejected ones were rejected because of their sins. People like Calvin (and his modern followers) won't allow that. It's true that when they feel the pressure that they say, "See how wicked the rejected ones are—they deserved to be rejected." They say this because it seems monstrous that God would reject multiplied millions for no good reason. If God rejects the millions and they turn out to be wicked we can always say, "Whether the decision to reject them and appoint them to destruction (using 1 Peter 2:8) came before they were born or not, they still turned out evil and deserved what they were predestinated to." (Can we say that of damned infants?)
But this is a smokescreen. Calvin expresses the matter with startling plainness (Institutes, 3.23.6):
"[God] arranges all things by his sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction."
They aren't doomed by being born and they aren't doomed at the time of their birth, God arranged it before they were born so that they would be born doomed and that they would glorify him by their destruction.
They aren't doomed because they chose to love wickedness or practice evil; they're doomed because God arranged for their doom before they were born and their birth was one of the steps God arranged in damning them to destruction.
Some might like to think that God foresaw the evil of the damned and ordained their damnation in light of what he foresaw but Calvin won't allow that for a moment. There might be room for saying that, he tells us, "if God merely foresaw human events, and did not arrange and dispose of them at his pleasure…but since he foresees the things which are to happen, simply because he has decreed that they are so to happen, it is vain to debate about foreknowledge, while it is clear that all events take place by his sovereign appointment." (3.23.6) He won't even allow Adam's "free will" to make a difference—the entire human race was made liable to eternal death not by Adam's act or their nature but by "the wonderful counsel of God" (3.23.7).
Calvin knew exactly the consequences of what he was saying. "I again ask how is it that the fall of Adam involves so many nations with their infant children in eternal death without remedy, unless it so seemed meet to God?...The decree, I admit, is dreadful; and yet it is impossible to deny that God foreknew what the end of man was to be before he made him, and foreknew, because he had so ordained by his decree." (3.23.7) He goes on in 3.23.8 to dismiss the idea that God only "permits" the wicked to perish and he denies that "man brought death upon himself merely by permission" and he insists that it was by "the ordination of God."
Calvin insisted that humans were evil at birth because they came from Adam and Adam became evil because God decreed that he should. When critics pointed out that that would make God the author of the entire mess (which he himself insisted was true—3.23.3, "it is most certain that he is"—the author of it) he reminded the critics that humans were very sinful. He seemed to think that that was answering their objection.
In 3.23.4 he concedes that the human corruption via Adam was what God predestinated the human family to and then he damned the bulk of the human family (even infants) for being sinfully corrupt. He says, "I admit that by the will of God all the sons of Adam fell into that state of wretchedness in which they are now involved; and this is just what I said at the first, that we must always return to the mere pleasure of the divine will, the cause of which is hidden in himself." So how does he answer the complaint that God is cruel? He says we're not to question God because we're only clay and God is the potter (he quotes Paul in Romans 9 as if he and Paul had the same question and situation in view).
Despite that, he goes on to say that God cannot do wrong so whatever he does must be righteous. It's true, he says in 3.23.9, that we don't know how it can be righteous but it is in "hidden recesses of the divine counsel."
So from Calvin we have this:
1. God who cannot be resisted predestinates the human family to sinful corruption.
2. When the human family became what God had irresistibly predestinated them to be God condemned them all to hell.
3. God eternally elects to save a minority of that condemned human family and rejects the majority, appointing them to eternal conscious torture.
4. He chooses to save and to reject not on the basis of human merit but simply because he is God and has a right to do it.
5. When people protest that that is cruel and unrighteous Calvin says we have no right to question God and that it is righteous though we don't know how it can be righteous.
Finally, two points:
I. I've said that Calvinism implies that God has reprobated "the majority" of the human family because it insists that only those who have faith in Jesus Christ are saved (which excludes the vast majority of the world since the days of Jesus' earthly ministry). It also claims that prior to Jesus all the nations were reprobated and only Israel was the elect (and, of course, only the elect within the national elect were the true elect). So there isn't any doubt that Calvinism requires the vast majority of the human family to be predestinated to damnation (including the infants, as we saw from Calvin above).
2. Calvin wrestled with difficulties in his views in this area but he insisted on holding to them with boldness and plain speech. Most of his modern disciples skate around, hemming and hawing; trying to put a better face on the matter but it's easy to see that they're trying to accommodate the modern person. Calvin towers above them all and won't give an inch.
If it's Calvinism you want—you can have it, but it would be better to get it from Calvin himself.
Some don't like to be lumped in with a Calvinistic scheme but there's an old saying: If it looks like a sheep, acts like a sheep, sounds like a sheep, eats like a sheep, smells like a sheep and lives with sheep—it's a sheep even if someone calls it by another name.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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