The Story of Calvinism - Phil Johnson

Rick I think asked me to do this because no matter who does this message no matter who treats this subject is going to get himself in trouble and Rick didn't want the trouble on his own back I can come in and do it and I'm gone so you could chase me down at my blog and leave comments there he wanted me to do this message on the history of Calvinism and you know there's been a running controversy in the church over the doctrines of election the sovereignty of God the question of human free will for centuries literally almost two millennia so what I want to do is I'd love to to actually do biblical exposition for you I prefer to do that I would do that but he asked for a survey of history that's what I'll do I'll start with two quick easy definitions these are simplified these are not technical definitions but just so you understand what we're talking about Calvinism of course is shorthand as a theological term for the kind of theology that stresses the grace of God and God's own initiative in the salvation of sinners its counterpart Arminianism which is likewise just shorthand for theology that stresses human free will now hopefully you already have most of you I think do have already some idea of what those terms mean and as we expand on them I hope you'll get a better grasp of what this debate is all about but I have a couple of things to say up front first if you are one of those who struggles with the idea that God exercises absolute sovereign control over everything that happens including the bad stuff that happens if you fear that Calvinism doesn't properly give enough weight to the idea of human responsibility and human choice or if you resist the idea that God chooses whom he will save from sin rather than leaving it to sinners themselves to make that choice if you struggle with those things I understand how you feel and I understand why those truths are hard to grasp I have not always been a as a matter of fact I was raised in the context of a Liberal Methodist Church so long before I ever became a Christian even my mind was poisoned really with a blend of theological liberalism and Wesleyan theology and even after I became a Christian it was several years many years really before I finally came to the point where I could affirm the biblical doctrine of election without trying to explain away clear statements of Scripture like Ephesians 1 verse 4 where it says that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him or Romans 9 verses 15 and 16 where God says I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion so then it is not of him who runs or of him who wills but of God who shows mercy I resisted those ideas for years and I knew the word election is a biblical word but I had a friend who explained it to me early in my Christian life this way he said God votes for you he wants you to go to heaven the devil votes against you because he wants you to go to hell you cast the deciding vote that's election and you know what that made sense to me and so very early in my Christian experience I was pre committed as an Arminian I went to a small church in the town where I attended college and my Sunday school teacher there was decidedly anti Calvinistic and almost every week he would warn us against the dangers of putting too much stress on the sovereignty of God every week he would work this into his lesson no matter what we talked about and he would teach us that human free will is actually sovereign and the choice is ultimately left up to each sinner to decide what to do with Christ that seemed reasonable to me it reinforced what I was inclined to believe anyway but at the same time my own study of the scriptures and my own reading of church history kept bringing me face to face with biblical statements and doctrinal issues that posed a severe challenge to my free will theology and then one Sunday well this guy was taking prayer requests a girl in the class raised her hand and said you know should we really be praying for our unsaved relatives she said because it seems like wasted effort to pray to God for their salvation because if he's already done everything he can to save them and now the choice is up to them why do we pray to God about it and I vividly remember the look on the face of this Sunday school teacher this was clearly a question that had never occurred to him and so he thought about it for a moment you can almost see the wheels in his head grinding while he tried to think of a good reason why we should pray for the salvation of the Lost and he finally said well yeah I guess you're right and from that Sunday on he never again accepted prayer requests for anyone's lost loved ones I remember that didn't seem quite right to me even as a pretty determined Arminian I just done a Bible study on Romans 10:1 where Paul says brethren my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved and I didn't fit with what I was hearing in Sunday school and not only that I began to wonder why should we pray to God about anything in the realm of human relationships if God never intrudes on the sanctity of human free will you know why should I pray for God to move my English teacher to look favorably on my term-paper if she is ultimately sovereign over her own heart was a point in praying about that those were questions I could not answer and the more and more I grew in Christ the more and more I studied scripture the more I struggled with questions like that and the more I studied the Bible the more it seemed to challenge all of my ideas about free will and the sovereignty of God and one by one over a period of about 10 or 15 years the doctrines of election and God's sovereignty and the total depravity of sinners became more more clear to me from Scripture and it was ultimately a sermon series by John MacArthur on the doctrine of election from Ephesians to that finally turned me into a full-fledged Calvinist and that was at least fifteen years after I first came to the Lord so I know what it is like to be baffled by these truths and to resist what seems like a dangerous tendency to go overboard with the doctrine of God's sovereignty I've been there I feel your pain I know these are not simple issues I'm not going to try to tell you they are and while I'm at it let me say also that it is possible to go overboard with the doctrine of election and to put so much emphasis on the sovereignty of God that you diminish the truth of human responsibility or even worse make God the author of sin that's hyper Calvinism and even though hyper Calvinism is not as common as our minion ism it's just as dangerous and there is just as much danger in the ditch on that side of the road as there is in the worst kinds of freewill theology and so this is not an easy issue and there's no way we're going to sort out all the difficulties in one hour but I'm going to try to make a good start now let me begin by saying I'm using the word Calvinism according to the popular usage that is the normal theological shorthand for the set of doctrinal truths that deal with human depravity divine election substitutionary atonement the grace of God and the perseverance of the saints those five points are usually referred to as the five points of Calvinism and we'll look closely at all five of them before the hour is over but I hope you understand that when I call myself a Calvinist I am NOT pledging allegiance to the man John Calvin I'm not affirming everything he ever taught and I'm not condoning everything he ever did I am convinced Calvin was essentially a godly man and he was one of the finest biblical expositors and Theological minds ever but he wasn't always right and especially I say this as a Baptist I am by no means one of his devoted followers so when I accepted the label Calvinist it's really only for convenience sake I'm not saying I am of Calvin in the Corinthian sense I hope you understand that it's a historical fact that the doctrines we call Calvinism were by no means new or original with John Calvin none of them were novel when he taught them and he wasn't trying to be novel a generation before Calvin wrote the Institute's the book where he really distills his whole theology a generation before that Luther had debated a Catholic theologian and philosopher named Erasmus over these very same issues and Luther wrote a book called the bondage of the will that is as Calvinistic as anything Calvin ever wrote but Luther wrote that book before he ever heard of John Calvin in fact Luther wrote it in 1525 and that year Calvin was just turning 16 and more than a thousand years before that Agustin the greatest theologian of the early church fathers who also had some serious theological deficiencies but he was right on the subject of race he had debated these very same issues against a man named Pelagius Jerome another church father who was a contemporary of Augustine lived in the land of Judea actually in Bethlehem at the time also defended the doctrine of God's sovereignty and salvation and before any controversy ever arose over this issue most of the early church fathers included powerful affirmations of the sovereignty of God and a Calvinistic view of election and grace in their writings and by the way if you want to see written proof of that find a little book by John Gill the great Baptist pastor who preceded Spurgeon in that same Church in London almost a hundred years before Spurgeon he wrote a book called the cause of God and truth which was basically a collection of quotations thousands of quotations from early church fathers affirming the very same doctrines we refer to today as the five points of Calvinism so this was not a novel idea with Calvin wasn't anything new about it Calvin himself didn't have the perspective that he was coming up with anything new if he thought it was new he wouldn't have accepted it and as Spurgeon said it's a misnomer to refer to the five points as Calvinism these are doctrines that have always been prominent in all the best strains of teaching throughout church history all the way back to scripture itself and what I want to do this morning is briefly review the historical debate over these issues I would love to give you a thorough systematic biblical defense of the five points maybe someday but this is primarily supposed to be an overview of church history and so I'll still try to give you the scripture references in all the right places but we're going to survey church history in the broadest possible way so if you're ready I want to start with the first time these doctrines became a major point of controversy in the early church it was the start of the fifth century the Roman Empire was collapsing and in fact on August 24th in the year 410 a group of barbarians I know you've heard of known as the Visigoths sacked the city of Rome and within decades the Goths the Huns the Vandals all barbarian peoples would overrun all of Europe including Britain now by then the church was already well-established in Britain you may not be aware of this but chiefly owing to the influence of the Roman army the Christian Church had a foothold a strong foothold in Britain long before the fall of the Roman Empire in 410 you may remember that the Roman Emperor Constantine had been converted to Christianity in some fashion a hundred years before this and Christianity had quickly become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and it was exported to Britain but in the Year 407 with the barbarians approaching the city of Rome the Roman government pulled the army out of Britain and they never returned again so the Roman army left and within 60 years Britain was overrun by pagan invaders the anglo-saxons some of us would claim them as our as our ancestors they were barbarians they were anti-christian they over ran Britain by the way Christianity never completely died out in Britain if you want to read about how Christianity flourished even during the anglo-saxon period in England read a book called the ecclesiastical history of England by the 7th century British historian named bead Bede you probably read part of it I had to read part of it in high school didn't mean anything to me at the time but it's a wonderful story of how the church survived when the culture collapsed and barbarians took over when that began to happen when the pagans began to invade Britain at the start of the fifth century many of the Christians who were there moved on to safer places throughout the Roman Empire mostly around the circumference of the Mediterranean and one of these British X Isles was a man named Pelagius Pelagius as far as we can determine seems to have been a native of Wales and in fact his original name was Morgan how it became Pelagius I have no clue but he left and first went to Rome and then from there he went to northern Africa and finally ended up in Judea near Bethlehem Pelagius was drawn to the land of Israel because Jerome was his theological hero Jerome lived in Bethlehem as I said during those years but in the end interestingly Jerome became one of Pelagius harshest critics Pelagius was a monk and an ascetic and his theological system seems to have been motivated by a desire to emphasize human responsibility because he wanted to provoke men to greater holiness but in order to stress human responsibility Pelagius taught that the human will is totally free he said it's basically within your choice to do good or to do evil you have that power of choice and in order to defend this turn of freewill he ultimately denied that human nature is inherently corrupt and what he ended up with was the purest form of works salvation that ever claimed the name Christian but it wasn't Christian at all because it it was a denial of some of the most important truths at the very heart of the gospel Pelagius his main opponent was Augustine when Rome was sacked in the year 410 Augustine was already 56 years old and it may interest you and it encourages me because I'm past fifty to know that the most productive years of Augustine's life all came after this he wrote his most important works after age 56 and in fact the body of work produced by Agustin after he reached his 50s is undoubtedly the single most influential collection of theological works written by a single individual since the close of the Apostolic era most of those works were prompted by the dispute he had with Pelagius here's how it happened when Rome was sacked agustin was the Bishop of Hippo which is a city in northern Africa a small town there at the time near Carthage in what is Algeria today and if you look at a map it was a straight shot across the Mediterranean from Rome to hippo and a lot of refugees went there to northern Africa after the Visigoths sacked Rome agustin became their pastor Pelagius was moving with those refugees and he arrived in Carthage not far from hippo Carthage also in northern Africa Pelagius arrived there in the year 410 that was the very same year Rome fell it was also the year the Pelagian controversy erupted this very crucial year 410 while he was in Carthage Pelagius acquired a copy of Augustine's autobiography confessions it's another book many of you probably read parts of Augustine's Confessions it was an autobiographical account of the bishops life and can version and it was the best-selling book of the time it was the purpose-driven whatever everybody was reading it and so Pelagius got a copy too and he began reading and in the book he found a section where Agustin says this now let me preface it by saying Agustin wrote the entire book is a prayer it's all addressed in the second person to God so when you hear this understand that this is part of the book it's the whole book is a prayer he's praying to God and here's what he says quote my whole hope is in your exceeding great mercy and that alone give what you command and command whatever you will you command self-control from us I am sure that no one can have self-control unless you give it to him unquote now notice what augustine says there this is a recognition of God's sovereignty over the human will augustine is praying for self-control over his lusts and in essence he says I know you command us to control our lusts but we can't control our lusts without your divine enablement so give what you command and command us to do whatever pleases you it's a great prayer but Pelagius read it and he said that's heresy he said it's a denial of human responsibility he said it's true that men are morally incapable of obeying God if we cannot exercise self-control on our own then we can't be responsible for what we do now let's face this honestly it would be foolish to say that Pelagius claim makes no sense because what Pelagius was saying does have a certain appeal to the human mind how can God hold people responsible for doing what they cannot do we've all asked this question I ask it every time I read Matthew 5 and Jesus says you have to be perfect the way God is perfect and it strikes me I can't be perfect like that how can he hold me responsible for not doing what I can't do we all ask that question it appeals to the human mind and so Pelagius started with that question and began a major debate about free will and the effect of sin on our ability to choose and so he challenged the view that God is sovereign he denied the doctrine of predestination and that is how the first major debate about divine sovereignty and free will and the doctrine of predestination broke out in Africa and from there spread throughout the Roman Empire the controversy caused Augustine to begin to think more deeply about these issues than ever he had often assumed the sovereignty of God he saw it in Scripture he wrote about it but he had never been forced to defend it before and so for the next twenty years until he was in his late 70s he was consumed with this controversy and he wrote a number of works refuting Pelagius those are some of Agustin's finest and most important works the books he wrote against Pelagius actually laid the theological foundation for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century and they were the first thorough theological textbooks written primarily to defend the doctrines we call Calvinism today by the way even though Pelagius is the guy who gave his name to the heresy known as Pelagianism and he's once started the whole debate he quickly became a minor character in the dispute within ten years after the start of the controversy he just totally disappears from the scene we know he went to Bethlehem he met Jerome after that we don't know what happened to him where he went when he died all of that is totally unknown and in fact most of his works don't even exist today the only thing we know about what he wrote is from reading the responses of Augustine and Jerome and other people who responded to him probably the most notable aspect of Pelagius system was his denial of the doctrine of original sin by the way you might say well if clay just died and didn't carry how did this debate keep going he had students whom he influenced they picked it up his best-known student was a man named Celestia's who himself wrote a number of works and began to take up this argument and as it influenced people more and more people began to argue for the Pelagian system and at its heart was a denial of the doctrine of original sin Pelagius and his followers denied that Adam's sin resulted in any guilt or any kind of corruption to the rest of the human race now you can easily understand why he had to take this position because he insisted that the human will must be free from all fetters or else people can't be responsible for what they choose and so if you're born a sinner by nature if sin is something you inherit then according to Pelagius system it would be unjust for God to hold individual sinners responsible for their sin and so Pelagianism said the human will has to be totally free inclined neither too good nor too evil we have to be completely free able to choose either way or else our choices can't be free and if our choices aren't free then we can't be held responsible for what we do now again I think if we're honest we can all see a certain reasonableness in the Pelagian argument here it is an idea that appeals to the human mind that's why whenever people abandon the authority of Scripture in favor of human wisdom you will see Pelagianism flourish convinced the only safeguard against these ideas is the clear teaching of Scripture and Augustine's answer was for the most part a detailed defense of the doctrine of original sin from Scripture he pointed out first of all that the Bible says sin is universal and Romans 5 says we inherit both the guilt and the corruption of sin from Adam he also pointed out that our universal experience affirms the truth of this issue nobody is free from the taint of sin search your own experience do you know anyone isn't tainted by sin and so agustin also went to scripture to prove that sin is a perfect bondage so that someone whose heart is carnal and sinful is not capable of freeing himself from that bondage scripture says men love darkness and hate the light because their deeds are evil john 3:19 so sin even colors what we love and what we desire and that's what determines our will and sinners cannot reform their own hearts by the sheer power of their own will two passages of Scripture are sufficient I think to produce to prove Augustine's point here Jeremiah 13 verse 23 can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots and then he says assuming the answer is yes then also you may also do good who are accustomed to doing evil he's using hyperbole there he's making he's making an ironic statement you can no more reform your own heart than a leopard by making a choice can get rid of his spots in romans 8 verses 7 and 8 because the carnal mind is enmity against God for it is not subject to the law of God nor indeed can be so then those who are in the flesh cannot please God sinners simply cannot free themselves from the bondage of evil by the power of their own will because the will itself is enslaved to sin now another great theological point agustin made was about the necessity of divine grace to draw the hearts of sinners to Christ I mean if we're totally in bondage to sin we cannot choose good on our own how could any sinner ever come to Christ the biblical answer and the answer a Gustin pointed to is grace is what makes that possible God draws the sinner when he wouldn't otherwise come and he went to John 6 to prove from the words of Christ himself that whenever a sinner comes to Christ it is because God moved him to come and we'll look at John 6 in a minute just briefly but that's that's the argument Agustin used he pointed out that if Pelagius was correct if you assume the truth of Pelagius system then ultimately sinners don't really need any grace at all to be saved if Pelagianism is true all the sinner needs to do is stop making the wrong choices and start making the right choices if our wills are truly free that we can do this on our own without any assistance from God's grace and in fact Agustin said that he had read all of Pelagius as works and he found him dwelling throughout these are his exact words I found him dwelling throughout on virtually no other topic than the faculty and capacity of human nature with scarcely any mention at all of the necessity of God's grace which is true in other words Pelagius theology was almost entirely man centered here's another direct quote from Agustin about Pelagius he says quote Christ's grace he treats with such brevity barely mentioning grace by names so that his only aim in mentioning it seems to have been to avoid the scandal of avoiding the subject now pelagianism so elevated the human will that the result was sheer work salvation with no place whatsoever for god's grace if you wanted to be saved according for the Pelagians you have it within your own power to choose to do good and thus ultimately perfect yourself that minimized the seriousness of sin it nullifies the need for divine grace Agustin was right about that now Pelagianism as a theological system was declared heresy by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD 20 years after this argument started a Council of Bishops was convened to consider it and they declared Pelagius as teaching heresy but the ideas and the arguments that were introduced into the church by Pelagius had so much influence that within a hundred years a whole new variety of freewill theology became popular this was a modified kind of pelagianism with the worst errors removed this new view acknowledged original sin they said okay yeah we do inherit some sinful tendencies from Adam and they acknowledged the necessity of grace for salvation who can deny that scripture says grace is what our salvation hinges on but this new theology suggested that here's how it works we're all falling in Adam but God's grace a measure of it is given equally to all men we get just enough grace to restore free will so that the ultimate choice for salvation is ultimately left up to the center again now that view is known as semi-pelagianism that's the technical name for it that is the actual theological name for semi-pelagianism the problem with semi-pelagianism is that it still makes salvation hinge on what sinners do for themselves by the way it I would acknowledge should be the first to acknowledge that semi-pelagianism is not as bad as Pelagianism Pelagianism I said is not even a Christian system of thinking right semi-pelagianism you can actually be a Christian and hold semi-pelagianism utley does make salvation hinge on what sinners do for themselves the problem here is that the difference ultimately between the saved and the reprobate is something the sinner must do for himself and so if you're saved and your neighbor isn't it's because you were smarter or you chose better or your will was stronger so that as a believer you end up with something to boast about because you're better because you made the right choice and faith itself becomes a human work and that contradicts Ephesians 2:8 9 which says for by grace you've been saved through faith and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God not of works lest any man should boast notice the reason Paul gives for all of this because it eliminates any reason for both and semi-pelagianism doesn't do that most forms of modern arminianism by the way are modified versions of semi-pelagianism but semi-pelagianism was likewise condemned as heresy this time by the Council of Orange in the year 529 and for hundreds of years the Augustinian understanding of salvation the doctrine of grace predestination all of that was the official position of the church the the mainstream of all theology it was the view taught by all the best theologians even though strains of semi-pelagianism by the time of the Protestant Reformation the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church had reverted to a kind of semi-pelagianism in fact at the time of the Reformation the Roman Catholic Council of Trent issued a decree denying that sin leaves the human will utterly in bondage to sin you can take the Council of Trent compare it with the decree of the Council of orange from 529 and and you can see that in fact these are contradictory decisions so the Roman Catholic claimed that they never changed their theology is clearly not true now one of the great advances of the Protestant Reformation was the recovery of the doctrines of grace from the confusion of medieval Roman Catholic theology and this brings up what I think is the key difference between Calvinism and Arminianism forget the five points for a moment let's boil it down to one central idea and in order to do that I'm going to give you two theological terms these are the only really technical terms I'm going to give you I promise I won't get any more technical than this but here is one idea you really need to understand in order to make sense of this whole debate two words that are contradictory to one another the first word monarchism mo n ER G is M mana jism monetarism simply is the teaching that salvation is entirely God's work even down to the point where faith itself is a gift of God it is not a work of human free will and that means that if you are a Christian you've come to faith because of the effectual work of God in you and not because you initiated the process by summoning faith out of your own will from somewhere within your own fallen and depraved heart monitor ISM is the central principle in all Calvinistic theology you boil Calvinism down to one idea and it's this if you are saved it is only because God effectually called you and drew you to himself and sovereignly had his way in your heart not because you came on your own or because you decided to cooperate and let him have his way and when you were so enslaved to your sin that you could not even believe that you couldn't possibly cooperate in a saving way with God God gave you a new heart in other words your faith is the result of God's work in you and not the cause of it so you can truly give God glory for your salvation you don't get to take credit for any aspect of it that's monarchism and biblical support for this truth is found for example in John 6:44 I promised we'd come back to this text listen to these John 6:44 no one can come to me Jesus says unless the father who sent me draws him and then he goes right on to say that all whom the father does draw in the way he's talking about all of them do come the very next verse verse 45 says everyone who has heard and learned from the father does come to me and verse 37 all that the father gives me will come to me and verse 65 no one can come to me unless it has been granted to him from my father those by the way are the very same texts Agustin answered PO Aegeus with monitor jism salvation is entirely God's work from beginning to end that is by the way the same truth you find spelled out in detail in Romans 8 verse 30 whom he predestined these he also called whom he called these he also justified whom he justified he also glorified there Paul lists all the aspects of salvation from eternity past when predestination took place to eternity future in which we are glorified and he says every aspect of it is God's work and he doesn't start the process without seeing it through to the end that's his whole point in Romans 8 monetarism now the other term is synergism sy n ERG is M synergism this is the idea that salvation involves a cooperative effort between the sinner and God synergism teaches that without your cooperation without your prior cooperation God could never begin the process of saving you he won't draw you unless you are first willing and therefore he cannot ultimately save you without your help synergism now obviously these two ideas are mutually exclusive Calvinism distills into the principle of mana jism arminianism distills into the idea of synergism and the problem with synergism is simple it's this it is tainted with human works from the beginning it has built into it a reason for the sinner to boast and that's the very thing paul rules out in Ephesians 2:9 the Protestant Reformation recovered the principle of monetary-ism it wasn't only Calvin but also William Tyndale and Luther and Zwingli and all the major reformers and many of the best Anabaptists as well they were solidly in the Augustinian tradition on this all of them were emphatically monarchists all the major Puritans were monarchists all the major Protestant confessions of faith have been explicitly mana gistic - and Arminianism didn't even become an issue until two generations after Kelvin did you realize this Calvin never even heard of Arminius he never encountered Arminianism but two generations after him some students of a Dutch theology professor named James Arminius or Jacob Armenians depends on how much anglicize do you want to make his name his students raised five points of dissent against the standard monitor gistic teaching a Protestant theology and they published a document known as the remonstration or the remonstrance in which they disputed these five points here are the five points first they denied that sin has so destroyed the human will that we don't have any ability to choose to follow Christ on our own second they denied the doctrine of predestination third they argued that the purpose of God was to save the whole world and not just the elect in particular and fourth they denied that God's grace is inherently efficacious or in any sense irresistible they said God may show you grace but you could resist it ultimately if God if you don't want to be saved God can't save you and fifth and they weren't dogmatic on this issue but this was the fifth when they left open the possibility that believers might fall away from salvation and finally be lost now for some reason in the 20th century our concept of Arminianism is kind of degenerated to that when you speak of our minion ism a lot of people think you mean somebody who thinks you can lose your salvation many of the original armenians didn't believe that none of them were dogmatic on that point but they left open the possibility and so this started a debate in the early 1600s and a council of reformed church leaders from several countries was convened to discuss it they met in door direct Holland which is anglicized as dort I love that name I didn't name any of my kids dort but it was tempting and they met there in dort to discuss these and settle these issues and they after after discussing for more than a year they met they unanimously ruled against all five of the Armenian objections and the document they produced is a list of articles spelling out and explaining why they rejected the ideas of the Armenians and what they affirmed in its place and their document is called the canons of the Synod of dort it's well worth reading you could read it in 20 minutes it's a short document but that is where the five points of Calvinism were spelled out for the first time it's important to understand that Calvin himself never catalogued these ideas under five headings was actually the Armenians who raised the five points and the canons of dort were a response to those Arminian ideas and so calling them the five points of Calvinism is a little misleading this is not like a structure on which Calvinistic truth is built the original Arminians first disputed these five points also the idea of listing these points under the acronym tulip is a twentieth-century idea i don't know who first thought up that acronym tulip but it was intended you understand this it was intended as a memory aid not a theological discourse about flowers right I hope you get that much even though the Synod of dort took place in Holland these guys never said a word about tulips for the record I don't really like the tulip acronym because for the sake of spelling the word tulip the acronym uses some terms that might mislead you so let me just quickly review what the five points actually teach and I'll use the tulip acronym because you're familiar with it but I want to explain along the way why I think some of these terms are not the best first one is total depravity that's the tea total depravity that term often misleads people who think it aims to teach that all sinners are as bad as they could possibly be that is not what it may depravity is total only in the sense that sin has infected every aspect of our being mine emotions will body soul and so on some people will prefer actually to use the expression total inability to stress the fact that what this idea really teaches that sinners are so infected with sin that they cannot please God that's exactly what romans 8:8 says and it is in that sense that depravity is total it totally affects us everything about us is tainted with sin so even the best things we do aren't perfectly good they're still tainted with sin sin affects the whole person what we do what we think what we love what we choose so all of our person is tainted with sin but it also affects everything we do so that even what we do that we think of as good is still not totally good so total depravity doesn't mean that we're all like Hitler it doesn't mean every sinner is as evil as he could possibly be it just means that nothing we do is ever truly and totally good nothing we do is good enough to earn God's approval that's total depravity unconditional election that's the UN tool of unconditional election there's a good term I think for the second point of Calvinism because what it means is that God chooses unconditionally who will be saved he chooses who's going to be saved and he does not do it because of anything good he finds in the sinner Ephesians 1:4 he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world so it's took place in eternity past this choice and election is unconditional in the sense that it is not based on some foreseen act of faith or any other good thing in the person that God sees ahead of time and therefore chooses but it's based solely on the good pleasure of God's own choice Ephesians 1:11 we are predestinated according to the purpose of him who works all things after the counsel of his own will we don't elect ourselves by responding to the gospel God elected us before time be and that is why we were drawn to Christ jesus said this exactly to the disciples John 15:16 you have not chosen me but I've chosen you he didn't mean of course that they hadn't chosen to follow him because they had what he was saying is he chose them first the reason they chose him is because they were drawn to him so he's saying God chose you before you chose him that's unconditional election now the L in tulip is probably the most contested point l stands for limited atonement and this is a tremendously unfortunate term I prefer the term particularly demson but that has two disadvantages first it messes up the tulip acronym you can't spell a tulip with a P in the middle and second it has a quaint old-fashioned sound to it doesn't it particular Redemption you say that to the average college student and he's not going to have a clue what you're talking about you may not have a clue what I mean here's what I mean by it Christ's death had a particular purpose and a special reference for the elect so that God's design was first of all to save them and Christ's death secured the guarantee of their salvation that was God's plan that was his design it doesn't exhaust everything about his design in the atonement but that was what he designed he that was part of his design to save the elect and Christ's death accomplished everything God designed it to accomplish I don't deny that Christ's death was Infinite in its value it was it was sufficient infinitely sufficient to save the whole world if that's what God designed and you know what even the canons of the Senate of dort affirm that truth but I do insist that it has a particular application to the elect in the words of first Timothy 4:10 if you want to prove text Christ is the savior of all men especially of those who believe so it's a particular reference to those who believe a special reference to the elect that's what this means by the way everyone even the rankest armenian believes the atonement is limited in some sense unless he's a universalist unless he thinks that everyone without exception will ultimately be saved including Judas but I'm assuming that all of us would agree that a completely unlimited atonement where everybody is saved in the end would be patently unbiblical the so that's the Ln tulip I irresistible grace irresistible grace and this is another expression that unfortunately misleads people I don't like the idea that that it conveys at first sight Dave Hunt who's a critic of Calvinism suggests for example that if you believe God's grace is irresistible then what you're really saying is God does violence to the Wills wills of those whom he draws to Christ let me just say categorically I don't know of a single Calvinist who believes that what we do believe is that God's grace is always effectual when God sets out to save someone he accomplishes what he designs and so I prefer to refer to Grace as effectual rather than irresistible but again that messes up the acronym and it's also not as clear a word but understand this grace is not something that pushes us against our wills at Christ it is something that draws us willingly to him in that sense it's irresistible let me illustrate I've loved Darlene since the day I met her right I find her irresistible but you know what she doesn't force my love for her she doesn't employ any constraint other than the sheer attractiveness of her charms to draw me to her she doesn't have to use any arm twisting or any kind of dress to get me to do her will well usually for the most part normally I do what she wants because I find her overpoweringly appealing she is irresistible to me God's saving grace is irresistible to the elect in that exact same sense that's what we mean by it God's love always secures its object God always procures a reciprocal love from those upon whom he sets his redemptive love remember John 6:37 which I quoted earlier all whom the father giveth me shall come to me God will not fail to save those whom he elects that's what we mean by irresistible grace and finally the perseverance of the Saints is the doctrine that those who are truly in Christ will never finally or completely fall away from the faith but we persevere in the faith because God graciously keeps us we are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation 1st Peter 1:5 it's not that the Saints have power in and of themselves to persevere on their own power but that God graciously secures our perseverance now I'm sorry we don't have more time than that to go over the five points because I'd love to go through the five points and detail and give you what I think are the decisive biblical arguments in favor of each point but I hope that's enough to give you the general flavor of what they are if you struggle with Calvinism I don't expect you to be convinced by this short survey of the history of the controversy but I do hope you'll see that Calvinism is not some quirky anomaly in the history of Christianity it is not a recent departure from the mainstream that's headed off in some bizarre direction the truth is these ideas have always belonged to the mainstream of sound theology throughout church history it's one of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity itself and the very anchor of sound doctrine that our faith is the result and not the cause of God's work in our hearts it was Spurgeon who pointed out that Calvinism is like an anchor for orthodoxy you watch the church through history when Calvinism has been taught and taken seriously for the most part the church has flourished nearly all the major revivals and missionary movements in the church prior to the 20th century have been the result of a mana gistic emphasis in preaching and the further the church departs from Monnett ISM the more theology degenerates into moralism or work salvation so cine anism liberalism and a host of other evils you see it today and the rise of open theism which is nothing more than an extreme radical form of Arminianism in order to explain away the sovereignty of God and to account for evil open theism devises a notion of God that in effect denies that even knows the future perfectly and what they end up with is a God who is not sovereign who is impotent to accomplish his will who changes his plans and his emotions with the changing of circumstances and who cannot say with certainty what the consummation of history will be that is not the god of Scripture listen to the prophecy recorded by one of the great Calvinistic prophets of the Old Testament Isaiah great Calvinists and he's giving a prophecy here so this is God speaking Isaiah 40 verse 6 for I am God and there is no other I am God and there is none like me declaring the end from the beginning in other words deciding what the end of history would be from before the beginning of it and from ancient times declaring the things that are not yet done saying my counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure that's the God you meet on the page of pages of Scripture he does all his pleasure he works all things after the counsel of his own will Ephesians 1:11 he is neither frustrated by nor uncertain about the outworking of history he knows the future because he planned it and decreed it and he will bring it to pass let me close with this some people resist theological labels and I understand that but it is my conviction that every genuine believer in Christ is to some degree a Calvinist whether he realizes it or not think about this with me if you are a Christian you already know in your heart of hearts that you were not born again because you are morally superior to your unbelieving neighbors you are worthy of God's wrath just like them Ephesians 2:1 and through 3 but God quickened you verses 4 through 6 God showed you a special mercy and that is why you are a believer you don't really believe that you summoned up faith and made a superior choice out of your own fallen sinful heart by your own unaided free will you don't believe that you don't believe you are inherently better than people who don't believe and you therefore must believe that God has given you a special grace that he is not necessarily shown to everyone you also believe that God is sovereign over all things I know you do because you lean on the promise of Romans 8:28 and that promise wouldn't mean anything if God were not in control of every detail of everything that happens because if he's not in control of all things how could he ever make all things work together for good furthermore you pray for the lost which means in your heart you believe God is sovereign over their salvation if you really didn't believe he was sovereign in saving sinners you would like my old Sunday school teacher quit praying for the lost and start doing everything you could instead to buttonhole people into the kingdom by hook or by crook using all kinds of manipulative measures to get them to make some kind of choice but you know that would be folly and you pray about other things too don't you that's pure Calvinism whenever we go to God in prayer we are expressing faith in his sovereignty over the circumstances of our lives nobody prays like an Arminian you even believe God is sovereign ly operating in the administration of his providence in everything in and around you you say things like if the Lord wills we show live or do this or do that James 4:15 because in your heart you understand that God works all things after the counsel of his own will and nothing happens apart from his will nothing is more biblical than these doctrines that are commonly labeled Calvinism in a way it's a shame they've been given an extra biblical name because these truths are the essence of what Scripture teaches us about God and salvation and they are at the very heart of everything we believe as Christians let's pray Lord we confess that our poor minds struggle with these issues that your word makes clear we pray that you would give us grace to understand and to submit and to acknowledge your sovereignty as we're commanded to in your word for the glory of Christ in whose name we pray amen

Channel: GoodTreeMinistries

Views: 135,531

Rating: 4.6586151 out of 5

Keywords: TULIP, Doctrines of Grace, Historical Survey, John Calvin, Council of Trent, Reformation, Reformed Faith, Augustine, Pelagius, free will, Predestination, Original sin, Total depravity, Arminianism, Sovereign grace, Unconditional election, heresy, common grace, 5 points

Id: dzY2kYH9nqI

Length: 56min 25sec (3385 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 18 2012