Common Objections to Calvinism Pt5

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the word of God and the doctrines of grace.

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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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And welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Today is August the 21st, 2020.

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And if you are reading along in our daily Bible reading, today you're going to be reading from Acts chapter 22.

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So my encouragement to you is to read the chapter.

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Remember the way that we study the scripture, we first observe, then we interpret, then we apply the text.

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So go through Acts chapter 22, read along, learn.

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And if you have any questions, feel free to send them to us.

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I would love to interact with your questions.

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So on with the program.

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Today on Coffee with a Calvinist, we're ending a five part series on common objections to Calvinism.

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Now I wanna say something about this.

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The reason why I'm doing the common objections to Calvinism is because over the last several weeks, I've been sharing the journey, first my journey to Calvinism, my pathway to Calvinism.

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And then I went through and talked about how our church became reformed.

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And in the midst of all of this, I know that there are people who are not reformed and maybe have some issues with the teachings of election and predestination and the five points of Calvinism, limited atonement and things like that.

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And I wanted to be able to address the most common objections, but I know that I'm not addressing all of the objections.

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I know that there are many objections that people have that these five short podcasts are not going to be able to address.

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What I've considered this week are the five that I hear most commonly.

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And again, I've been a Calvinist now, I guess I would say officially since about 2005.

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So that puts it at right around 15 years.

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And I've been a full-time minister for that long.

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And I have heard many people who have had objections.

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I've heard people say Calvinism kills churches, Calvinism kills evangelism, Calvinism this, Calvinism that.

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And so I've sort of distilled the most common objections to these five, but I'm not in any way trying to say that these are the only five.

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I'm just saying these are the five that I have encountered most commonly.

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And in the months ahead, I'm sure I'm going to be looking at other objections.

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I'm going to be listening to other sermons and interacting with some things that are said.

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I'm going to give some feedback.

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I'm going to play some things.

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So again, this is not ending today.

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I'm sure this is not the last time I'll be dealing with objections to Calvinism, but today is an opportunity to round out the five-part series that we began back on Monday.

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On Monday, we looked at the question of Calvinism and evangelism.

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If God is sovereign and has already chosen who he's going to save, why do we evangelize? And we answered that question Monday.

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On Tuesday, we had a very special episode because we actually interacted with a sermon by Dr.

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J.

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Vernon McGee, where he said that if you believe in predestination and election, you believe that people are zombies.

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So that's a fairly common objection.

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It's an issue of the question of free will.

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And does predestination and election mean that we're all zombies or robots? And I dealt with that on Tuesday.

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And then on Wednesday, we asked the question, does God want to save everyone? And we looked at the verses that most people use to make that argument.

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And then yesterday's program, we said, well, if God doesn't want to save everyone, if that's not his will to save everyone, does that mean that he is evil? Does that make God a evil deity? And we talked about that as well.

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So if any of those questions, if you haven't listened to a previous podcast, and if any of those questions interest you, I would encourage you go back and listen to the program on those days.

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Now today, to round out our five parts this week, we're going to ask the question, if Calvinism is true, why do so many pastors and Bible teachers deny it? And the fact of the matter is, Calvinism is the minority report, particularly in American evangelicalism, Calvinism is definitely the minority report.

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Now this is changing as certain men have been used of God over the last generation, such as R.C.

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Sproul, John MacArthur, John Piper, you know, men like that.

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Excuse me, God has, by his grace, allowed for there to be a expansion of Calvinism.

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And some people even say it's not true Calvinism, but it's a form of neo-Calvinism.

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And I'm going to talk about that in the weeks to come.

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I'm going to discuss, you know, the different flavors of Calvinism and talk about hyper-Calvinism and, you know, neo-Calvinism and sort of how do we define these and where do people fall in? Big R reform, little r reform, we're going to talk about that on a later episode.

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But when it comes to the issue of reform theology, even, I think it was several years ago, there was a magazine, I think it was Time Magazine, could be wrong, but it was talking about trends in the evangelical world.

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And one of the trends that was mentioned in the magazine was a rise in Calvinism and a going back to Calvinism.

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And if you've never seen the movie Calvinist, I would encourage you watch that because that sort of talks about the reason for the rise in Calvinism.

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Why has Calvinism risen in the last generation? Because it seems to be that people are invested in investigating the spiritual heritage that goes beyond just their parents and their grandparents, but going back to the roots of such as the Baptists, the Baptists who came out of the 17th century England.

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And what did the Baptists in 17th century believe? The ones who wrote the first London Baptist confession and the second London Baptist confession and who came and brought the Baptist beliefs into the United States, they were firmly Calvinistic.

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I mean, if you read the 1644 London Baptist confession, it's firmly reformed Calvinistic.

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If you read the 1689, it reads very similarly to the Westminster Confession, which of course is also, we would say is Calvinistic in its view of soteriology.

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And it certainly affirms all of the points of Calvinism.

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And so one of the things that has happened with the reason I think for the rise in Calvinism is people looking for something a little bit deeper than what they may have experienced in churches.

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And I think that we would all agree that especially the 70s, 80s and 90s gave birth to a very shallow Christianity.

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And it was a lot of show, but not a lot of depth.

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And a lot of churches were a mile wide, but only an inch deep.

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And there's still a lot of churches like that around, but what we're seeing and what we did see is sort of the response from many people in my generation was, no, we need to go deeper.

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We need to know what the word says and we need to know what the theology of the scriptures is.

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And that's why like for our church, the motto for Sovereign Grace Family Church is theology matters.

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This is something that has been said for years by people like Dr.

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James White.

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And it really just fits into what we believe.

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We believe that theology matters.

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What you believe influences how you live and how you worship and how you behave.

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It influences every part of your life.

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And so the rise in Calvinism, I think, is seeking to learn more about the history.

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And when you go back into the history of Protestantism, you see the influences of men like John Calvin.

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You see the influences of men like John Knox.

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The John Bunyan, these powerful forces of God, these powerful men of God were used and these men had a firm belief in the sovereignty and the election of Almighty God.

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So I think that's one of the reasons.

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But this leads us to the question of, well, if Calvinism is true, why do so many pastors and Bible teachers deny it? Well, a lot of the pastors that are around today don't believe in Calvinism because, and I hope this comes across properly, a lot of them, it was not the issue that they were dealing with at the time.

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And therefore, it wasn't the main thing that they had to think through.

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So it was, I think about this with Dr.

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Vernon McGee, Dr.

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J.

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Vernon McGee, we listened to him on Tuesday.

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The issues of Reformed theology were not the focus of his generation.

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He was around, I believe, when they were fighting the battle for things like the inerrancy of Scripture.

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It was in the 70s that the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was produced.

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And why was the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy produced? It was produced because of a rise in liberal Christianity, which I think is an oxymoron.

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Let me just stop right there.

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I think it was Machen who said, liberal Christianity is not another form of Christianity, it's anti-Christian, it's un-Christian.

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And it really is because it denies the gospel, it denies the word of God, it denies the truth of the centrality of the work of Christ and the cross and propitiation.

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And so to say that someone is a liberal Christianity, in fact, next week on the program, my plan, and I'm not sure yet, but my plan right now is I'm gonna actually, I'm gonna respond to a liberal preacher who came out and said that Jesus would walk with BLM and the Antifa stuff.

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And I want you to hear what he had to say, and I wanna respond to it from a conservative Christian perspective.

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But be that as it may, the point is, the battles that were being fought in the 70s were battles for the integrity of the Bible, the truthfulness that we believe in the truthfulness of the Bible.

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And thankfully, there were men of faith.

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R.C.

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Sproul was a part of that.

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And I believe James Montgomery Boyce was a part of that.

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And even men that would not be reformed, see James Boyce and R.C.

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Sproul were both reformed, but men like, oh, he has a systematic theology, his name just slipped my mind, but it'll come to me.

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The point is there were men on both sides of the spectrum of theology, but they all held to the inerrancy of the Bible.

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And so that sort of brought everyone together.

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But now we, 40 years after that, now almost, wow, 50 years after the 70s.

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Right now we're 50 years away from 1970.

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I'm gonna stop and weep for how fast time flies.

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And so when we consider 50 years, what is the battle that's going on now? Well, the battle now is one of the same that it's always been, liberalism trying to creep its way in, social justice and things like that.

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But one of the ways that that's being combated is through the solid preaching and teaching of the Word of God, solid theology.

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And solid theology is people who are investigating theology learn that the great confessions of the faith, the great creeds of the church, these are solid reformed documents.

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And so again, when somebody says, well, why do most teachers not, why do most teachers, most pastors and teachers deny it? Well, I wouldn't say that most do deny it.

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I wouldn't automatically assume that that is a correct statement.

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I wanna say right away, I don't think that that's a correct statement.

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I think that many do.

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And I think it's partially a generational thing.

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I think most of the time, it's based upon a misunderstanding of the doctrines of grace.

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As I said, when I played Dr.

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McGee, it was obvious that Dr.

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McGee doesn't seem to have really, it doesn't seem that he has really dealt with the heart of the issue.

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And what he, the things that he was saying were canards.

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They were not good arguments.

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They were red herrings.

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They were not based in what we believe and teach.

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They were straw men, red herrings.

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They were not good arguments.

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And I'm gonna tell you two stories that has happened to me.

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And I think these kind of sum up sort of what I have experienced.

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Because as a Calvinist pastor, I have, and one who has made it known that I'm a Calvinist.

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I have not been quiet about it.

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I've not been ashamed of it.

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And so one who has made it known, I've been very clear, this is who I am.

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And that has made it to where some people see me and that's all they see, you know, because they don't like it.

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One particular pastor who is near to our church, and he has a church near to ours, I walked into a restaurant and he was there and he looked at me.

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And from across the room, he said to his son who was sitting next to me, he goes, that guy's a Calvinist.

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And like said it really loud.

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And then looked up and noticed that I heard him.

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And he immediately sort of looked away and kind of turned away sheepishly as if it was something embarrassing.

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And I just sort of smiled.

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I was like, yep, that's it.

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But it was almost like I had three heads.

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Look at the Calvinist.

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Look at, here he comes.

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He's the weirdo.

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And again, I tell this story only to say, it's not as if they don't know that there are Calvinists out there, but a lot of they just don't want to deal with it.

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They, we are the, we're the strange ones on the other side.

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We're not gonna engage with you.

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You believe something we don't believe.

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We don't want anything to do with it.

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And that's often what happens is a lack of willingness to engage.

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Several years ago, a pastor that I knew, I met him when I was in seminary.

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He had a, he did a sermon, Calvinism kills churches.

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And, or why Calvinism kills churches.

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And so I called him and I said, I tell you what, I said, do you remember me? I'm a pastor.

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You know, I went to seminary there at Jacksonville Baptist.

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Do you remember me? And he said, yeah, I kind of remember you.

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I said, well, I want to, I want to tell you, I heard that you preached a sermon called Calvinism kills churches.

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He goes, yeah, I sure did.

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I said, well, I just want you to know I'm a Calvinist and I would like to invite you to come and debate your position at my church.

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And we will provide a meal.

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We'll provide you with a nice forum.

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You'll have your time to share your side.

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I'll have my time to share my side.

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We'll have cross-examination.

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We'll have questions and answers and you'll have an opportunity to share.

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And I'll have an opportunity to share.

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And I think it would be good for God's people to get to hear both sides articulated well and two men of God who are willing to stand on their positions.

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And that's not something we haven't done.

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Our church, we've done debates in the past.

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We've debated the subject of infant baptism at our church.

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We've debated the subject of the Sabbath, whether or not Sunday is the Christian Sabbath.

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And so I invited him, I said, come and do this debate.

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And he said that he would.

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And then later he backed out.

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He said, later he said he wasn't interested.

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But it was one of those times where I really legitimately wanted to give him the opportunity and give our people the opportunity to see what we believe defended.

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And I wanted to give him the opportunity to lay out his case so that we could, in a Christian and loving way, respond to what he was saying.

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And again, at first he was all for it.

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Then for whatever reason, he decided that he didn't want to do it.

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But the point of the matter is, he was more than willing to say what he was gonna say.

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But when it came time to be challenged, there was, for whatever reason, there's no desire to be challenged.

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And that's where a lot of us get to.

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We get into echo chambers where we're only listening to people who agree with us.

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And here's the thing I've note.

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A lot of Calvinists were once Armenians, like myself.

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I was an Armenian.

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I've said that before.

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I became a Calvinist because of the scripture.

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So I have had the benefit of seeing both sides.

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But most people who are Armenians have never been Calvinists.

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And therefore, they don't have the benefit of being able to see it from both sides.

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And they have their little group, their little echo chamber, and they don't really even understand Calvinism.

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I would say that the most people that deny Calvinism don't even really understand what is being said.

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All they hear is the word predestination, and immediately they're done.

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And I'll finish with this story.

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This is probably one of the best to give the example of what I'm saying.

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Years ago, I was standing in Lifeway Store.

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This was before the Lifeway Stores closed.

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And I was reading the book, The Five Points of Calvinism.

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And a man walked up to me and he stood beside me.

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And I could tell he wanted to talk to me.

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And I really didn't want to talk to him, not because I was being rude, but just because I wasn't in the mood to have small talk.

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And I knew what he wanted to talk about because I knew he was looking at the book I was reading.

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And he looked at the book, looked at me, looked ahead.

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I could see that he was building up the confidence to say something to me.

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Finally, he said, so what you reading? And I turned the book over and showed it to him.

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And he goes, ah, Calvinism.

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So what do you think about that? And at the time, I was still in seminary.

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And I said, you know what? I'm still studying it.

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I'm interested, you know, wanting to learn the history of the faith.

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And yeah, I sort of, I was really in my mind, I was praying, God, please make this man leave me alone.

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I really don't want to have this conversation in the middle of Lifeway.

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I'm not in the mood.

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I wasn't in a bad mood.

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I just wasn't in the mood to argue.

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I knew what the guy, I knew he was opposed to it basically by his body language.

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I didn't want to have this conversation.

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So finally, he said, well, how did he say? He said, I tell you what I don't like is, I don't like limited atonement, the L.

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So I stopped, I closed the book and I said, sir, do you believe in hell? He said, well, of course I believe in hell.

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I said, do you believe that people go to hell? And he said, yes, absolutely.

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But I believe everybody gets a choice.

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And I said, well, if your issue is with choice, then your problem isn't with the L, your problem is with the U, unconditional election.

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It's not with limited atonement.

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I said, the problem is you really don't understand the system at all.

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And he just looked at me and gave me a dirty look and he goes, well, I think everybody gets a choice.

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And he walked away and I wasn't trying to be rude to him, but the point of the matter is, most people haven't investigated enough in the argument to even engage.

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Now, there are some who seem to have investigated into the argument and there are great debates online that you can go and watch.

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Dr.

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James White has debated this subject with several people and I would encourage listening to his debates.

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Some of them are very good.

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Some of them demonstrate that the other person doesn't really know much about the subject and they just don't like the word predestination.

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But ultimately, I know I gotta bring the program to an end.

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Let me just say this.

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The reason why most people deny Calvinism that I have seen in my experience is they do not understand it.

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They live in an echo chamber with other folks who are agreeing with what they're saying.

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No one is challenging it.

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No one is making them have to be consistent and therefore they're not interested in learning these things because learning Calvinism, learning the doctrines of grace, it really is, it forces you to have to go back and learn and study more.

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And a lot of people are not interested in studying more.

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A lot of people are satisfied with what they know and good, bad, or indifferent, they're gonna stick with what they know.

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So my encouragement to you at the end of this week is this.

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When we think about the subject of Calvinism, yes, there are people who have objections, but know this for certain that those objections can be answered biblically because I'm not a Calvinist because John Calvin, I'm a Calvinist because the Bible teaches the doctrines of grace and they can be defended with the scriptures.

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So I hope this week has been entertaining and informative and I hope that you go into this weekend excited about this coming Lord's Day.

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And I look forward to having you back on the program Monday morning when we continue our Coffee with a Calvinist program.

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Again, thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.

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May God bless you.

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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 6.30 a.m.

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on YouTube and Facebook.

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If you enjoyed this lesson, please take a moment to respond by hitting the like button, leaving a comment and subscribing to the channel.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.

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May God bless you.