Clip from The Dividing Line, 12/2/2008

On Peter Lumpkin's blog, I started a response to Lumpkin and I just finally just gave up and said, let's not bother with that.

But David Allen has posted a very, very lengthy response to Tom Askell, and of course

I leave it to Tom to respond to the vast majority of it because he's good at that. But he mentions, additionally, that the

John 316 conference was billed as a biblical and theological evaluation of in response to five -point Calvinism.

Since the majority of Southern Baptists are clearly non -Calvinists, I see no conflict of interest here, either on my part as a speaker at the conference, or the part of the seminaries that chose to be co -sponsors.

Dr. Askell continues with this statement, although I must say that any conference that accuses James White of being a hyper -Calvinist loses credibility with thinking people, and quote,

First, the conference did not make the claim I did. Well, the conference makes no claims, obviously, but the speakers do, so I'm not sure that talk about parsing words to no avail.

If there is any credibility to be lost, it would be mine and not the conference. This single statement is the only statement Dr. Askell makes concerning my comments about James White.

Given the evidence I presented during the John 316 conference, and my defense of this accusation on this very website on Monday, November 24th,

I find it impossible to swallow Askell's statement. He will have to provide some argumentation or evidence to claim his fault.

He offers none. He doesn't need to. I've repudiated it. Phil Johnson has repudiated it.

And it would require you to identify a large portion of historical Calvinists as hyper -Calvinists.

Even when they were arguing against the hyper -Calvinists, it means you don't know what the term means.

You've been misled by Tony Byrne and others who are not balanced. They are just not balanced on this.

They have a crusade they're on, and they're far more intent upon attacking

Calvinism than promoting the freedom of God and salvation. They don't mind having their stuff used to promote rank

Arminianism as long as they can go after somebody who believes in particular redemption. And so, it's your sources, sir.

You've been misled by your sources. Now, you shouldn't have been because you're a professor of systematic theology.

But you've been misled by your sources. You continue to say, in fact, Askell seems to continue to miss the whole point by bringing up James White in the first place.

I commendably quoted Askell's affirmation of God's universal saving will in addition to reading his own careful Calvinistic qualifications and pointed out how

White's rejection of this orthodox Calvinist position on God's revealed will places him in the category of a hyper -Calvinist on this point.

Dr. Allen, you are wrong. W -R -O -N -G.

You are not listening. What did Tom Askell say? He said that we need to differentiate between the decree of God and the prescriptive will of God.

Did he not say that we need to recognize that there is that will of God that is revealed in his law?

He reveals that man should not murder. Therefore, you can say

God desires that men not murder. Yet we know in the sovereign decree of God that the lamb slain from the foundation of the earth was handed over to be murdered.

That is a distinction that is biblical in origination. It is the prescriptive will of God that we do not kidnap.

And yet God intended through kidnapping for Joseph to go into Egypt. So we recognize that there is a difference between the two.

And what Tom Askell said was God's prescriptive will is that all men repent and believe.

On that level you can say God desires the salvation of all men. But my problem has always been when you go beyond the recognition of the prescriptive will of God and you force into God's heart an irrationality in regards to what he desires.

That's all I've been trying to say and I've said it over and over again and your tradition keeps you from hearing me.

You see, there are people who want to say, well you have to affirm that God is disappointed, that God has willed his own eternal disappointment, that he wants to do something that for some reason this other part of him, this schizophrenic part of him, doesn't allow him to do.

And I can't take that kind of irrational view of God into the arena of apologetics of the world religions.

I not only can't do that, I won't do it, because the Bible never tells me anywhere that that's how I should do so.

There is room for argument and disagreement on how to interpret 2 Peter 3 .9. I don't think that I've seen a meaningful counter -exegesis of the text that in any way takes into consideration what we have to say.

And one thing is awful certain, nobody at the John 3 .16 conference even tried to engage in such things.

I mean, I was going to play it part, but I'll get to it next time. Steve Lemke, stumbling through Matthew 23 .37

again, even though we've written about these things, we've explained these things. So you are wrong,

Dr. Allen, W -R -O -N -G. You have been publicly shown to be wrong. Stop repeating falsehoods, sir.

What Tom Askel said and what I'm saying are the same thing. We recognize that there is the prescriptive will of God where God commands all to repent.

That's why I can preach the gospel to everyone. But to go beyond that and say, well, what that also means is that I want to ascribe to God unfulfilled desires and eternal unhappiness because he tried to save everybody.

Isn't that a denial of election in the first place? It is, obviously.

And so you've been misled, sir. Your sources are bad. The scholarship of it is bad.

It's inconsistent. It's not exegetically sound. And I would invite you to do what

Steve Lemke said, who I think spoke right after David Allen, who said we need to be careful not to call

Calvinists hyper -Calvinists when they're not. And to that, I can actually applaud for one time in that context.

So then notice at the end of this statement, and then we'll take our break, okay?

Yes, of course, I agree about the decreed of will. Incidentally, the attempts, I'm quoting Allen again.

Incidentally, the attempts of Phil Johnson and James White at parsing words, nuancing or otherwise skirting the main issue at hand have failed to show my initial statement concerning White to be false, in my opinion.

Now this is the same man who dares to disagree with Tom Askell in identifying him as an anti -Calvinist.

He wants to have the right to define his position. But when I directly refute his false accusations and the person he quoted as his foundation say you misunderstood, notice what he says in the next sentence.

I am willing to concede Johnson's point that his primer does not state what I interpreted it to state.

So the very source he uses, he now concedes he misunderstood. That was the grounds of his accusation.

But then he says, he has every right to state that he is the author, what he is the author, intended by his own words.

This does not, however, remove the fact that given the declarations and links found in the primer,

I had epistemic grounds for my interpretation, that is, my interpretation was a reasonable interpretation.

So even though the author says he got it wrong, the person he's falsely accusing says he's got it wrong, we repudiate it, he's going to stick by his guns.

But he's not an anti - because he says so. Well, there you go. Same gentleman who introduces the idea that there's a moral debt we owe to God that Jesus didn't pay.