The Problem of Calvinism and Social Justice

AD Robles

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Alright, well there's one more comment that I wanted to talk about, but I wanted to make a special video for this one.

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This is a comment that was on my video about Russell Moore, Al Mohler, and Matt Hall, and the evangelical impotence displayed by each of them.

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And this commenter says this, he says, All the people referenced in this video negatively were

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Calvinist. I respect that AD is willing to critique them, but when are Calvinists going to admit,

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Calvinists, not just evangelicals, have a problem? I remember back when Calvinists said that they were the solution to liberalism.

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Now they seem to be its cutting edge. Now when I first saw this tweet, the very first reaction

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I felt in my gut was I wanted to defend Calvinism, because I am a Calvinist, definitely a

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Calvinist, I'm talking like the most hardcore of the hardcore, you know, I smoke cigars,

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I drink liquor, you know, drink black coffee kind of Calvinist. And I am not ashamed of that at all.

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If you're an Arminian, I have no beef with you most of the time. But I am a Calvinist. There's no question about that.

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I love Calvinism. But you know, this commenter has got a point, because a lot of the people

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I critique are Calvinist. Now that's not to say that there are not Arminian social justice warriors.

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There definitely are. But I concern myself with Calvinists more than just evangelicals in general.

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That's just my take, and that's what I focus on, and that's, you know, what I'm primarily concerned about.

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And it is troubling to see people that are otherwise very good theologically essentially promote liberalism in many, many areas.

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And we've got to come to terms with that. I think we do have to recognize that, and we have to figure out why that is.

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I have some thoughts, but the purpose of this video is to solicit your opinion. I want to know, why do you think that Calvinists are on the cutting edge of so much of this social justice warrior ring?

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Now in respect to the commenter, he has an idea, and I found it in another comment of his.

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So I want to read it to you. I don't agree with this, but just in respect to do him justice,

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I will read it to you. Here's what he says. He says, in response to someone else, he says those quote unquote

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Christian leaders you named are all Calvinist leaders. Many of us tried to warn about them years ago, including pointing out the left leanings of Russell Moore and Nat Chandler, but we were ignored.

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Is it any surprise that a movement built on quote stealth Calvinism, and he defines that as coveting and lying to steal non -Calvinist churches with its leader

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Al Mohler, thinking everyone should pay for his exclusively Calvinist seminary, including the majority non -Calvinists that he wouldn't let them teach there, but they should still pay for it, ends up being politically left wing?

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Now that's a, you know, there's a lot there, and it's a little confusing, the comment, but the idea being is that Calvinists like Al Mohler adopted a strategy that is very liberal in general, that they steal and covet other people's church members into Calvinism, and then they make non -Calvinists pay for their

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Calvinist seminaries. I'm not going to get into that. I don't really understand really what that's supposed to mean, and I don't think that's really what it is.

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Here's my thought, and I'm interested if you want to leave a comment on what your thoughts about this are.

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I'd love to hear it, because this is just my opinion, but I'd love to hear yours. When it comes to Calvinists, I think that there's been an uncomfortability amongst

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Calvinists that there is a lot missing in their Calvinism. A lot of people have noticed this over the years, that being

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Reformed is more than just believing the five points of Calvinism. Being Reformed is an entire orbit of theology, and there's a theology of all kinds of things.

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There's a doctrine of man, there's a doctrine of scripture, there's a doctrine of God, there's a doctrine of law, and stuff like that.

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I think that there's been a lot of, I don't know, anxiety about the fact that when you're a

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Calvinist these days, it's like a thin Calvinism. You believe the five points, but almost begrudgingly.

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Even if you don't believe the five points begrudgingly, there's a tendency to want to take exceptions to the

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Westminster Confession or the 1689, or not to want to be too rigid on some of these things.

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On the one hand, I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to be, but on the other hand, I think that's a problem because Reformed theology as a whole, it's all kind of interconnected, and so it's very difficult to do that, to kind of isolate the five points away from the confession in general.

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I'm a Westminster Confession guy, I don't make any bones about it. I only have one thing that I'm kind of iffy on in the

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Westminster Confession, maybe we'll talk about that some other time, but I subscribe to all of it, even that thing, I still subscribe even though I'm not 100 % on it.

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But I think that, and I've heard people articulate this, I've heard social justice warrior, like Calvinist five -pointer types articulate this exact thing, they say, look, at first you guys were saying that we were antinomian because we didn't have a doctrine of the proper uses of the law, and now we're trying to apply the law, talking about social justice, and you still have a problem, and there was almost a lot of exasperation that they're trying to complete the theology, they're trying to fill out the parts of their theology that were too thin, and we're still complaining.

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And it's like, yeah, we're still complaining because you're trying to divorce it from the law of God, like you can't just fill out the theology about justice and about the civil governing authority and about the practical outworkings of the law of God with anything you want.

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It has to be based on the law of God itself, like you have to apply the moral law of God, you have to apply the general equity of the civil law of God, like you can't just make stuff up and expect us to be happy with it.

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And I think that there is a lot of angst when it comes to some of the five -point

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Calvinist types about just the parts of their theology that aren't all the way thought through.

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You gotta keep reforming, right? The five points are great, I love the five points, but you gotta go further than that, you gotta keep reforming, you gotta believe the whole book, you know what

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I mean? You gotta apply that general equity of the civil law if you wanna be safely in,

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I don't really know how to put this, but in proper theology, in good theology, if you wanna be safely in God's will, these are things that you have to be comfortable with.

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And people are very uncomfortable with that, because the civil law of God, the general equity of it, says a lot of very harsh things, like you have to be for the death penalty if you're gonna apply the law of God.

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You have to be for the death penalty for rapists if you're gonna apply the law of God. You have to be for the death penalty for kidnappers if you're gonna apply the law of God.

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These are things that are non -negotiable, and you've gotta take this stuff very seriously, and I think there's a tendency with kind of five -point

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Calvinist sort of squish evangelical types to not really want to do that. They wanna have some flexibility there.

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They don't want to bring God's law to bear when it comes to things like immigration or stuff like that.

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No, they'd rather be flexible, because I think a lot of these people are trying to be relevant.

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That's a very important thing to people, they wanna be relevant to the culture. And when you say things like we should execute, you know, murderers without question, we should execute kidnappers, rapists, and stuff like that, all of a sudden the world's like, you know what

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I mean? Like, they don't wanna be friends with people like that. Those are extremists, and I think there's a tendency with five -point

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Calvinists to not be that extremist. They don't want to be the caricature of Calvinists that they see all over the place.

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They wanna temper that with what they, they wanna be more reasonable, I think, than that. They're afraid of being called a fundamentalist, or a right -wing extremist, or a

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Christian zealot, or a Christian extremist. And like, I'm not scared of that at all. Like if the Bible says it, it might sound extreme, but I'm gonna go with it, you know what

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I mean? Because it's not, I don't get to choose what to preach, I have to preach the book. You know what

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I mean? I have to preach the book. So I think that there's an angst with a lot of Calvinists, five -point

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Calvinists. Like on the one hand, they wanna be ferocious and they wanna be like, yeah, I'm gonna believe the word of God, I'm gonna stand on the word of God.

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But they know, deep down, that that word of God says a lot of things that are going to be very troublesome for them in the public square, like things that they don't wanna say.

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Like, the other day I got ridiculed for saying something about how I was grateful to God for the slave trade in my own situation.

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Now this is something that any Calvinist should be able to say, because God works all things out for the good of his people, and so it's very easy in my case to see how he worked that out for the good of me, because in my family,

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I benefited from the slave trade. I'm not saying the slave trade's a good thing, but at the same time,

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I thank God for that because I reaped blessings and benefits from that slave trade.

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And you see, that should be something that any Calvinist should be able to say yes and amen. All of our, like even our best passages, like Genesis 50 talks about that exact thing, slavery, working out for the good of Israel.

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This is something that is basic Calvinism, but you're not gonna find Russell Moore saying stuff like this.

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You're not gonna find Gospel Coalition people saying stuff like this. You're not gonna find Al Mohler saying stuff like this, and then they'll see some moron on YouTube saying something like that, and they see how

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I say it without apologizing for it, I'm not worried about it in any way, and people are trying to cancel me and I don't care, and they feel very uncomfortable with that, because they know they should be able to say that.

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They yes and amen that in their brains, but they would never say it, and that makes them very uncomfortable, and so they're trying to do something with it.

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And unfortunately, what they do ends up being they do something, yes, but they're filling it with liberal progressive stuff, because that's the easy stuff.

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It's easier to get approval when you're doing that stuff, as opposed to what the law of God requires. That's my opinion.

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What's your opinion? Why do you think Calvinists are on the forefront of some of this stuff? It doesn't make sense. This guy has an opinion.

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I have an opinion. What's yours? Leave it in the comment below. Share this video so we can get a bigger sample size, and I'll do a follow -up video on what your responses are, because I'm very interested to see what you have to say.

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I'm not saying my opinion's correct, but I've thought about this a little bit, and that's kind of what I've landed on. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful.

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Looking forward to seeing your responses. God bless. So I'm trying to figure out how to say this in a nutshell, and I guess what it is is this.

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Calvinists, because of their commitment to the Bible and because of their commitment to Puritans and people that did this very well over the years, they know they have to fill these gaps in their theology with something.

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They can't just leave them empty. They have enough integrity to know they need to do something about it.

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They need to fill it with something. But they definitely don't want to fill it with the law of God, because they don't want to be one of those extremists.

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So what they end up filling it with is something that kind of has an air of biblicalness to it.

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They can kind of make it fit sort of thing, but it makes it super easy. It doesn't cost them anything.

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It doesn't cost you anything to come out against racism in all the ways that the world's coming out against racism.

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But it does cost you something to come out against racism the way the scripture demands it.

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In other words, like calling it out amongst black people as well. That does cost you something. It does cost you something to point out the partiality in so much of what you see coming out of Gospel Coalition and ERLC.

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That does cost you something. So they won't do that, but they will do stuff that kind of sounds biblical, but is okay for the world as well.