It isn't God we question!
Hard-line Calvinists insist on embracing what looks like opposing truths and chide people for trying to work them out rationally and logically in the light of scripture. "Clay has no right to question the Potter," they say, as if they were using the imagery in the same way Paul used it in Romans 9. But having chided others for working with apparently contradictory claims they themselves go to extraordinary lengths to make their proposals appear rational and logical and morally beautiful. You see this every time one of them "picks up his pen". They profess they're only interested in proclaiming what the Bible teaches and then they go on to attempt to show their "biblical" views are rational and logical.
One Calvinist tells me that what keeps him in good temper and on an even keel is that God saves us whether we're Calvinist or Arminian. There's the consolation—we're saved! The fact that on Calvinist terms God has created billions for lifelong misery in this life and eternal torture after judgment doesn't rock his boat or disturb his equanimity.
We'd jump up in protest if someone were accusing a mere friend of ours of consciously putting some poor soul in a no win situation that must end in prolonged misery! We'd demand proof of the highest order to support the accusation and if we got it we'd go deal with our friend, hoping to bring him to his senses. And are we to respond with "friendly jibes" at some coffee-house Areopagus when God is saddled with such conduct? In the face of the (alleged) truth that because it pleased and glorified him God created billions of humans and put them in a no win situation we're all to smile and be happy that he saves the Arminians and Calvinists and purposely damns entire nations, generation after generation?
The no win situation isn't created by humans—sinful or otherwise! We're told that it was God alone who purposed it and brought it about and sustains it. Why are humans sinners? Why do they love sin? Why do they act sinfully? How does it come that they came to be sinners who loved their sin? Gordon H. Clark (Religion, Reason & Revelation, 238) makes no bones about it. He asks if Calvinism "makes God the cause and author of sin?" and answers: "Let it be unequivocally said that this view certainly makes God the cause and author of sin." [Whatever is to be said about Clark's views, you almost always knew where he stood. These others who like to run with the hares and hunt with the dogs and smile while they talk about billions who inherit damnation are an entirely different breed.]
Clark insists that we're responsible for our sins and therefore deserve eternal conscious torture at God's hands. We might think that we are responsible on the basis of our free will, our knowledge of God's will and our choice to reject it. Not a bit of it! Using Romans 5:17, 19, he insists (page 231) that "our responsibility is not ultimately based on our choice at all." And what's more, so you know that I'm not misunderstanding him, he offers this (page 222) under the heading of the will of God: "I wish very frankly and pointedly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do so." So there we have it:
God is the cause and author of sin!
If a man sexually abuses his child for years, it was God's will that he do it.
Such a man deserves eternal torture but not because he chose to sexually ravage his child because God ordained in eternity that he should do it.
Clark doesn't mean that God used an already wicked man to do the wicked things he chooses to do, things that God will use to further hisredemptive purposes; no! Clark means that God eternally purposed this man to be wicked, brought it about and is the author of the man's sin. "There was never the remotest possibility that something different could have happened," says Clark (238) of any historical event because God authored and arranged them all so that they would happen.
If you want to see what running with the hares and hunting with the dogs means, take a look at John Piper's attempt to sidestep his hard-line Calvinism in the matter of infant damnation. It turns out that all dying infants are saved (apart from faith and the new birth) because they're not capable of hearing and rejecting the will of God. He tells us they're born corrupt in sin, alienated from God, spiritually cut off and then die without faith but they're saved because of John 9:41. Absolutely marvellous! [http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Articles/ByDate/2006/1622_What_happens_to_infants_who_die/]
His congregational colleagues say that the death of an infant is "a sensitive thing" so they skate all over the place trying vainly to offer hope for dying infants, despite their Calvinism which consigns them to hell (as John Calvin himself stated). In the end they confess they can't offer assurance of salvation to all dying infants. They end up passing the buck to Piper who, since it is a sensitive matter [do you tell broken-hearted parents their dead baby has gone/will go to hell?], makes eternal lostness conditional—something he elsewhere flatly denies! It's a good political move for congregational leaders since it removes the offence of a barbaric doctrine at a point where its offence is more obviously felt.
But what makes the death of a child "sensitive" in this area? A little child is incapable of obeying God's will not, says Calvinism, because it is mentally incapacitated but because first and foremost God eternally ordained that it would be incapable! According to Calvinism its mentalinability has nothing to do with the baby's inability to obey God—that's a secondary issue and Piper and his colleagues know it. (That's why Piper's congregational colleagues look for (alleged) "exceptions" like John the Baptist and David.) But babies are no more incapable of obeying God than adults because the adults that once were babies were rendered incapable by God at conception and God saw to it that they remained that way. Calvinism says God predestinated every single human—baby or adult—to moral and spiritual corruption, rendering them incapable of obedience to God. Piper and his colleagues believe and teach this and then talk about the death of a child being a sensitive matter so they skate around their doctrine looking for loopholes!
The predestinated moral corruption and death of any human is a "sensitive" matter. Calvinists cover the barbarism of their doctrine by the fact that humans are very sinful and so "they deserve eternal torture"! But that's a shrewd manoeuvre! It's shrewd and masks the doctrine because according to Calvinism God who cannot be resisted planned and brought about the sinfulness of humans. So when he tortures them eternally he does so because humans were what he irresistibly made them to be.
John Piper insists that God irresistibly ordained every single human to be morally blind, deaf and paralysed and then writes a book calledWhat Jesus Demands From the World. Is that not astonishing? He's running with the hares and hunting with the dogs.
All this they say and then skate all over creation trying to make it look morally Christ-like and in the same breath claiming we're clay and God's the potter so we have no right to question him. And, perhaps what makes me cringe more than anything else—they go on and on and on about God's holy generosity and grace! This is how they respond to the stupidity of the worst face of Arminianism that has believers shaking in their shoes about whether they're saved or not and damns people without hope who were unlucky enough to be born in the wrong part of the world! Click here.
It isn't God we question!
These aren't issues to be discussed with light hearts and "friendly jibes" in a coffee-house Areopagus where the disputants can cross textual swords and admire one another's dexterity and erudition. [The thought of it makes you want to wretch!]
He was talking about people with the sovereign power to do it, people who ordained others to lifelong slavery, who so arranged things that the children and grandchildren of those under their power were born into the same misery—he was talking about that entire situation when he said:
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch— AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead. William Lloyd Garrison (American abolitionist, journalist and social reformer, December 12, 1805 –May 24, 1879)
©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.