Demanding Irrationality

I would like to make some hopefully concluding comments on the subjects that have been raised, especially in regards to the use of the term hyper-Calvinism. I know I'm not going to convince any of those who have a particular agenda, that's fine, but I want to make sure that people who are honest-hearted and want to just, you know, know where the spectrums of beliefs are, have a clear idea of what the real issues are.

Clearly, there are, especially Southern Baptists, who use this terminology in a pejorative sense just simply to try to close off conversation and keep people from listening to all sides. But then there are others who, while acknowledging the existence of what even they themselves call high-Calvinists, will then just use a broad-brush stroke and ignore careful distinctions to call people hyper-Calvinists, and that's what, of course, has happened to me as well.

High Calvinism, Hyper-Calvinism, and the Need for Careful Distinctions

I suppose my Calvinism would be a high-Calvinism. It comes from not only the church that I am a member of and an elder in—I don't believe that I and my fellow elder have any differences on this matter at all—but also, I think I do have a bit of an unusual background and milieu of ministry, in that when you engage in apologetics on a high level with leaders of world religions and you engage the best the other side has to offer, you have to be consistent.

It's not good to come to a debate and say, you need to be careful in saying X, Y, and Z, you're contradicting yourself here, when you yourself are holding to somewhat inconsistent positions. Once again, I've come to my Reformed conclusions because of biblical exegesis.

I've come to these conclusions because I'm forced to these conclusions by the text of Scripture, but the more I study Scripture, the more I am struck by its harmony and its unity—not its disunity, but its unity in its presentation of who God is.

And I know there are many who just go the opposite direction. Well, they seem to be bringing in some presuppositions that are not born from the biblical text itself. I wanted to illustrate this by a post that Tony Byrne put up on November 10th.

He quoted Dr. Robert Raymond, and in fact, I believe Tony shortly after this came into channel, and when I asked him, well, do you think Robert Raymond's a hyper-coward? He said, well, of course he is.

Just of course. It's not even a question. And he makes the assertion in his conclusions after citing what I'm going to read for you that Dr. Raymond denies in any sense God's having a saving desire for those who are non-elect.

Notice that Tony's conclusion does not follow from what I'm going to read, that he again misses the very same distinction that I make and does not seem to allow for the recognition that in God's prescriptive will and his revealed will and his law, all men are to repent, and therefore, insofar as that can be said to represent God's desires—however you want to define that—then we can say that God desires the salvation of all men.

But as I've pointed out over and over again, the Bible itself does not allow that to be the final word. For God also prohibits, well, the selling of someone into slavery, and yet he decreed Joseph be sold into slavery so that he might go to Egypt and save many people alive.

Are we really to believe that God is in essence schizophrenic at this point? That he really, really doesn't want the brothers to do this, and his heart is breaking that his brothers are doing this, and yet they're doing what his decree has been to save many people alive.

So part of God's heart is pleased, knowing what the result's going to be, and part of God's heart is sad, and we have this very strange concept being predicated of God. I think this really involves a desire to anthropomorphize God way too much.

We need to allow God to be God. God is timeless, God is sovereign, and God's decree would seem to me to be what represents his desires. Does it not say whatever God wills, he can accomplish? My concern all along has been this idea that some might get that we're presenting a God who decrees his own unhappiness, who creates in such a way that he's going to be perfectly joyful about only part of his creation, but the rest of it he's just going to spend eternity in turmoil and disappointment and unhappiness.

And maybe I've read too much Jonathan Edwards, or maybe I've read too much of Isaiah. I just don't see it. I don't see it, and I know which texts are used, and I don't see those texts being used that way in an appropriate fashion either.

And so, with that, I would like to provide to you this quotation from Robert Raymond, make some comments on it, because I think it'll also help us to see the broad brush paint stroke, the genetic fallacies that people like Tony Byrne are using in their current activities, shall we say.

Here's what he said. Some Reformed theologians teach that God can and does earnestly desire ardently long to see come to pass and actually work to effect things which he has not decreed will come to pass.

Basing his conclusions on his expositions of Deuteronomy 5 .29, Ezekiel 18 .23, 32, 33 .11, Matthew 23 .37, and 2 Peter 3 .9, John Murray states in the free offer of the gospel that God represents himself as earnestly desiring the fulfillment of something which he had not in the exercise of his sovereign will actually decreed to come to pass, that he expresses an ardent desire for the fulfillment of certain things which he has not decreed in his inscrutable counsel to come to pass, that he desires the accomplishment of what he does not decretively will, that Christ willed the bestowal of his saving and protecting grace upon those whom neither the Father nor he decreed thus to save and protect, that God does not wish that any man should perish his wishes rather that all should enter upon eternal life by coming to repentance, and finally that there is in God a benevolent loving kindness towards the repentance and salvation of even those whom he has not decreed to save.

John H. Gerstner similarly asserts, but without the requisite scriptural support, in a predestination primer that God sincerely strives with men whom he knows and has predestined should perish, that God who knows all things, including the fact that certain persons will in spite of all efforts reject and disbelieve, continues to work with them to persuade them to believe, and that God who knows the futility of certain endeavors to convert certain persons proceeds to make these endeavors which he knows are going to be futile.

If one followed this trajectory of reasoning to its logical end, one might also conclude that perhaps Christ, though he knew the futility of his endeavor, did after all die savingly for those whom his Father and he had decreed not to save, but all such reasoning imputes irrationality to God, and the passages upon which Murray relies for his conclusions can all be legitimately interpreted in such a way that the Christian is not forced to impute such irrationality to God.

For these other interpretations, I would refer the reader to John Gill, The Cause of God and Truth. Now at this point, Tony himself expresses some absolute amazement. He says it is also astonishing to see Robert Raymond's reference to an approval of John Gill on this point.

Now he puts on this point in italics. Actually what Gill did was he was saying, and this is one of I think Byrne's biggest problems, he just doesn't allow for context for anybody, Robert Raymond himself or anybody else for that matter.

The specific thing that Raymond says is, here is exegesis of these texts that does not force one to assert irrationality of God. He didn't say, I agree with every single thing John Gill ever wrote, but I have John Gill in my library, does that make me bad and evil?

Does not John Gill have excellent material on any number of things? Even those who criticized him, even when Spurgeon criticized him, he also recognized that his brilliance was almost unmatched. So isn't it a matter of having some kind of balance?

I mean this kind of attitude would mean I could never read Presbyterians if I'm a Baptist or if I'm a Presbyterian I could never read Baptists. I mean you have to read with some level of discernment and allow for some level of disagreement don't you?

I mean Tony even himself recognizes you've got low Calvinists and high Calvinists and hupo-Calvinists and you've got hyper-Calvinists, but for him evidently this definition of hyper is just, you know, it's the be all and end all of all things.

But notice what he says here, from the above citation one can see that Robert Raymond does not think that God in any sense wills, wishes, or desires to save the non-elect. Notice he doesn't allow Raymond even the possibility of recognizing the prescriptive will of God.

Raymond himself has been very clear in focusing upon this idea that we don't want to ascribe to God irrationality. That does not mean that the prescriptive will of God does not contain the command for all men to repent and that this therefore represents God's command that all men repent.

That's just not allowed. That's just outside of Tony's area and unfortunately as a result when David Allen then utilizes Tony's materials almost entirely for his presentation, the result is what we have seen.

And so, you know, it's interesting my first response to this was to just note the irony of the John 316 conference taking place and my being accused of these things while I was out doing the very kinds of things that true hyper-Calvinists don't do.

You know, they say, oh, no, no, hyper-Calvinists evangelized. Well again, if you just want to make the definition of this, well, you have to, the only way you can truly evangelize is if you have this idea in your heart that God's going to be eternally saddened at the loss of every single individual who's lost.

He's just, he's going to be, that's what God intended from eternity. You can't evangelize outside of that. How many people did? Tony himself seems to admit in another very interesting comment that I saw him make that his view of what true Calvinism is, is a minority view.

He seems to admit that the majority of those in the, you know, 1689 London Bapst Confession of Faith would have held the views of atonement, for example, that I would hold to. And so, hopefully by now, between what I've put on my blog, what we've put up on YouTube, if you have a serious interest in understanding why, you know, Tom Askell says we need to recognize the difference between the prescriptive and the decree of the will of God.

If you allow for that distinction to exist and allow us to operate within that distinction, and if you do not force us to somehow read the very heart of God in the sense of, well, you have to believe that God has eternally decreed his own unhappiness.

If you want to make that the definition between high Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism, I can't stop you, but it's irrational. And you're going to end up off over in the corner with two or three of your followers chattering about that while the rest of us go on with what's really important.

And so, is this important? Yeah. Anybody who watches my debates knows, you know, you've got to be consistent in what you're presenting to others. Does the word of God allow us to be that way? Liberals say no.

I don't follow the liberals, and I think they have a fundamental problem. The scriptures are consistent. God does accomplish all his desire. He has the power to do so, and I believe he does so in glorifying himself in the salvation of his elected people.

Does he show grace, mercy every day to the non-elect? You better believe it. If he didn't, he'd wipe them off the face of the earth in an instant, wouldn't he? Does he not give them great blessings and benefits?

Yes, he does. Does any of that change a single heart? Never does, because outside of that saving grace of God, what we see there and what should jar us when we see it is the hardness of the heart of man.

That's really one of the biggest problems of the John 3 .16 conference. There should have been two other presentations, but they wouldn't ever want to make them. That would have been a presentation on the sovereignty of God, and then instead of just having Dr. Patterson tell interesting stories about the sinfulness of man, there should have been some attempt to present some kind of defense about the autonomy of the will of man.

Those things didn't happen. Another reason why the conference really did not address the subject in any meaningful fashion. Anyway, I hope this is useful to you. Thanks for watching. God bless.