Atheist Darrin and WLC

Atheist Objections to Romans 9 and John 6

Now, again, I said I wanted to, likewise, just briefly also respond to the citation of a, well, it's question number 79 at ReasonableFaith .org. That's William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith with William Lane Craig is the title at the top of the page.

Question 79, Molinism in Romans 9. Now, those of you who do not know what Molinism is, Molinism is a Jesuit philosophy, part of the Counter-Reformation. It is an unbiblical philosophy, that is, its derivation is not from the study of Scripture.

Its derivation is from the desire on the part of the Jesuits to oppose the proclamation of the freedom of God in salvation. It was part of Reformed theology. It has pretty much been abandoned by everybody on the Roman side of the Tiber River, but is now championed by William Lane Craig and others.

And Troy Brooks also is real into Molinism, which I found really funny, because he's a Dave Hunt fan as well. And they always like to say, well, you know, look what Calvin did to Servetus, so his theology must be all wrong.

But we don't mind promoting Jesuits. I just love the level of consistency you get out of some folks. Anyway, question 79 is from a fellow by the name of Darren. And it starts off saying, I'm an atheist currently reading Reasonable Faith.

And he writes to him and he talks a little bit about a few things. But number two, the second point is the main point. Here's what the atheist says. In Romans 9, Paul describes Jacob and Esau as being judged as loved and hated or loved less before they did any good or evil.

Paul then goes on to liken all of this, all of us as clay molded by a potter and says that this is not the will of he who runs, but of he who shows mercy, which saves us. Paul relates God telling Pharaoh, for this purpose I raised you up.

And then discusses an idea that the vessels God made for common use are there only for the purpose of showing his patience to his more special pots. Many Reformed think this passage shows double pronestination and unconditional election.

And I am forced to agree with them, as is Christ himself in John 6, 65. The Reformed God, and listen to this, this is an atheist speaking. The Reformed God is something I view as tyrannical and unworthy of worship.

And indeed it is tough for someone outside the faith to respond to the Calvinist interpretation of Romans 9 with anything but hatred. As the prominent Reformed scholar James White describes this very chapter, quote, I understand that the only way one can believe this is by an act of grace, end quote.

In my view, this defeats your position of Molinism, since one cannot freely choose God on his own in any potential setting without God's prior help. Furthermore, the context of the related story in John 6 has disciples abandoning Christ, prompting what he says in 6, 65, and proving that Christ is not offered as a free gift to all.

What is left for the freedom of man to choose Christ, given these passages? Thank you graciously for your time, Darren. Now, we then have Dr. Craig's response, and let me give you what he says. Second, let's talk about Paul's doctrine of election in Romans 9.

I want to share with you a perspective on Paul's teaching that I think you'll find very illuminating and encouraging. Now, wait a minute, we're talking to an atheist. Before we even read what he says here.

Should we at all be shocked that an atheist finds the presentation of the biblical God disturbing? We're talking about a creature who is busily involved in rebellion against his creator. We're talking about someone who is described in Romans chapter 1 as expending effort to suppress the knowledge of God on a daily basis.

And so, is it at all shocking that he would find the view of God found in the Bible, not just in Romans 9, but I could multiply the Romans 9 passages about God's absolute sovereign freedom, especially from the Old Testament, over and over and over again?

Is it shocking that atheists would find this offensive? I have told the story many times of a woman who came to our offices back when we were on 16th Street many, many years ago. And she had called and she needed to interview a fundamentalist.

And I truly felt like I was under glass or something like that. You know, oh, here's the specimen now, man, be careful, it spits. And so she comes in and she's a Roman Catholic from the Keno Institute.

And she needs to interview a fundamentalist. And so she asks some standard questions, as I recall, about what I believe about the Bible and things like that. I turned the conversation eventually to the gospel and to who God was and to grace.

And eventually presented to her the freedom of God and salvation. And she was shocked, absolutely shocked, that I actually believe that God's the one who determines who he's going to be gracious to and who he's going to be just to, in the sense of just meting out their deserving punishment.

And she was just shocked. And I remember she said to me, I would never worship a God like that. And I said, of course, unless God changes your heart by his grace, that's exactly what I'd expect you to say.

And she just had no response and wrapped up the interview very early, very, very quickly after that. Because I think that just scared her. And so it concerns me on one level but does not surprise me at all.

That so many evangelicals are like, we need to, I mean, I don't want to say anything that's going to offend Darren. He's an atheist. Who do you want to be more concerned about offending? A creature denying his creator or your creator?

No one seems to be concerned whatsoever about whether God is offended by what we think about his truth. I mean, put yourself, let me give you an illustration. What if you're a parent? And you have a young kid, say, second, third grade.

And they've been given an assignment where they're going to have to stand in front of the class and they're going to have to talk about what you do and what you've done to get to that point you're at in life.

And so you take the time to explain your history and your education, what you've done and things like that. And you decide you'd like to hear this. And so you have your child take an MP3 recorder. So you'd like to hear how this goes and what the comments are.

And so your child gets up there, starts talking, but you can tell there's something wrong. And maybe it's because you don't make as much money as other people do and as other parents do. Who knows what the reasons are, but you can tell that child is absolutely embarrassed to have to talk about you and who you are and what you do.

You would be mortified. You would be crushed by such an experience. But Christians, for some reason, never seem to think twice about the fact that we have God's truth and God has revealed certain things about Himself.

And yet we are so stinking concerned about what creatures think, that we will back off and we'll go, I don't want to talk about that because there might be some people who are, well, they might be offended.

They might be offended that God in His justice has brought His wrath to bear upon sinners. I mean, there's all this stuff in the Old Testament about wiping out all these people. I just don't know what to say.

I guess you forgot that they were the people who offered their children in sacrifice to Moloch. I guess you forgot they were deserving of the wrath they received, and so are you. My, we are so concerned about how people feel.

But we don't give a care about how God feels about His glory, His honor, the honor of His word, His gospel. It is amazing how upside down our society can cause us to be. Absolutely upside down. And so we go, oh, you said something that offended Darren.

Well, if it was God's truth, well, hallelujah, I'm glad I did. I only spoke His truth. I don't think there's any reason for me to get in the way and offend somebody unnecessarily. I'm not talking like Peter Ruckman, okay?

But when the very simple claims of God and God's freedom are offensive to people who are rebelling against God, that's a good thing. That means you're actually speaking the truth of God with enough clarity that they understand it.

You know, the scary thing is, there's a bunch of people who have massive platforms and they speak to thousands of people, but they're so scared to speak the gospel with clarity that people listen to them all the time and they never get offended because they're not speaking clear enough for anybody to understand what they're saying.

If you can proclaim, quote-unquote, proclaim your gospel and that Darren's the world are not offended, buddy, you got a problem. You got a problem. And it's a big one. Let me just try to summarize some of the things that are said here by William Lane Craig.

You can read it. Like I said, it's at reasonablefaith .org. Just go to the questions and answers. It's number 79. You can read it for yourself. I'm not trying to hide anything. Basically, let me just give you the summary here.

This is explosive teaching. Paul begins Chapter 9 by expressing his profound sorrow that ethnic Jews have missed God's salvation by rejecting their Messiah. But he says it's not as though God's word had failed.

Rather, as we've already seen, not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel and not all the children of Abraham because they are his descendants. Being ethnically Jewish is not enough. Rather, one must be a child of the promise.

And that, as we've seen, may include Gentiles and exclude Jews. He's exactly right about that, by the way. That is missed by most people. That is the key. This is what Paul is discussing, is no, God's word has not failed.

The problematic, then, this doesn't make any sense, the problematic, then, with which Paul is wrestling, as it's the problematic, with which Paul is wrestling is how God's chosen people, the Jews, could fail to obtain the promise of salvation while Gentiles, who are regarded by Jews as unclean and execrable, could find salvation instead.

Paul's answer is that God is sovereign. He can save whomever he wants, and no one can gainsay God. He has the freedom to have mercy upon whomever he wills, even upon the Gentiles, and no one can complain of injustice on God's part.

And you might go, well, that sounds very Reformed. And at that point, it does sound very Reformed, but, of course, you have to try to read that through a Molinistic lens at that particular point in time.

Paul's burden, then, in Romans 9 is not to narrow the scope of God's election, but to broaden it. He wants to take in all who have faith in Christ Jesus, regardless of their ethnicity. Election, then, is first and foremost a corporate notion.

God has chosen for himself a people, a corporate entity, and it is up to us, by our response of faith, whether or not we choose to be members of that corporate group destined to salvation. Well, there you get your corporate election, which, of course, is very common, but utterly indefensible on any type of exegetical basis.

Well, Jews is the select one. Well, try to make that work in Ephesians 1 and Romans 9. It doesn't work. It is just an abandonment of the text to saying, well, yeah, he's got his elect, but it's an amorphous, faceless, nameless group, and we determine whether we get to be in it or not.

We've talked about the havoc that reeks with atonement and things like that and the problem that the direct object of the verbs in Ephesians 1 are people, not a group. It is very direct. Then it says, of course, given God's total providence over the affairs of men, this is not the whole story, but Mullenism makes good sense of the rest.

John 6 .65 means that apart from God's grace, no one can come to God on his own, but there's no suggestion there that those who refuse to believe in Christ did not do so of their own free will. Well, of course they chose not to believe of their own free will because their free will is a slave.

John 6 .44 had made it very, very clear. No one can come to me unless the Father sent me to draw them. So it is, you know, these aren't answers. These are taking a philosophical system and using that to overthrow the text of Scripture.

There's no exegesis provided here whatsoever. It says, God knows in exactly what circumstances people will freely respond to his grace and places people in circumstances in which each one receives sufficient grace of salvation if only that person will avail himself of it.

Now, I wonder how this works. This would be an interesting question. In Mullenism, God knows exactly what a free creature will do given certain circumstances. So does God put everybody in a position where he would know that they would accept him?

That means that there are certain... What keeps someone from accepting Christ is the circumstances in which God places them. There's a lot of problems with this system. There are... It doesn't work, folks.

The main problem is it's not derived from the exegesis of Scripture. It is a philosophical system forced onto the text of Scripture. But there are all sorts of problems. I mean, if you have the elect, then are these the only ones that God puts these free creatures in the circumstances where they'll embrace him?

But he doesn't put other people in those circumstances? Or does he put everybody in those circumstances, but only some people do? But I thought God knew exactly what to do in any given circumstances. Sorry.

That's what happens when you try to get around the plain teaching of the Bible. It doesn't work very well. But the main thing I wanted to address there was... I've had a number of people send this to me.

They say, you offended an atheist. Yeah, you know, I've done that a lot. And you know what? There are times on Sunday morning I offend Christians. That's a good thing. Because that's what the Gospel does.

And if you've gotten to the point where the Gospel no longer offends you, you better pray that God's going to wake you up. Because that's not a good place to be.