Radio Free Geneva: Calvinism's Gospel Tautology Refuted

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I'm praying I can.

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I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them.

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They're following men instead of the word of God. I'll never be a mentor.

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I'm praying I can. And I'm gonna be the one standing on top of my hands, standing on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out,

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He died for all! Those who elected were selected!

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Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers.

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I think

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I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves Calvinists.

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The central of the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever...

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Ladies and gentlemen, James White is a hyper -Calvinist. Now, whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper -Calvinists.

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And greetings! Welcome to Radio Free Geneva on the Dividing Line. We're going to try to get it all in within an hour today.

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I was directed to the Unbelievable Radio broadcast last weekend, where a discussion took place, a debate took place, on Calvinism.

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A French former atheist, now Reformed theological philosopher, was giving the

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Reformed side of things, and on the other side was one of the two primary individuals at the

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Tyndale Philosophy Program up in Canada. And that was

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Dr. W. Paul Franks. He was the one that dialogued on the subject of Calvinism from a non -Calvinistic perspective.

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And I was hoping to review it, but there wasn't really much to review.

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I'm getting a lot of stuff in, you know, people saying they can't hear the sound, and somebody on the channel saying it's not...

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I fixed it! Oh, you fixed it. Okay. All right. Well, okay. Well, they all catch yours, and start telling me about it, and distract me.

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And there's somebody on Twitter saying, it seems like YouTube playing right now is today's live show, but they're recording the last dividing line.

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So, you fixed that too? Hey, you're the techie guy.

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I'm just telling you that people out there are confused, and so on. Anyway, I was going to review the

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Unbelievable broadcast, but there just wasn't much to review. It was one philosopher saying, this is my view.

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The other philosopher saying, this is my view. And I guess it should be expected, because I don't believe

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Reformed theology is arrived at by philosophy. Christian philosophy, if it's truly

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Christian, begins with Christ, and hence begins with a supernatural worldview, and with divine revelation.

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So Christian philosophy, if it's consistent Christian philosophy, will be revelational at its foundation.

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It will not try to reason to revelation. It will not make man's reason the central aspect of its existence.

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It can't, because all truth, and all philosophical truth, is found in Christ.

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And so, by the very truth claims of Scripture, the Christian philosopher cannot consistently, it doesn't mean they don't, but cannot consistently play the world's perspectives on the issues of philosophy and things.

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It just can't start in the same place. It can't pretend that we do. You can't do just plain old philosophy and then slather on some

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Christianity on top of it. That doesn't work. And so, the real problem was that the very first reference, even quotation, of a

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Bible verse took place in the closing statements on the

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Unbelievable Program from the Calvinist. And that was the closing statements.

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It finally got to the foundational stuff. They had been talking about God, and evil, and theodicy, and all the rest of the stuff, without ever once making reference to the only reason why a really committed

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Calvinist believes what he believes, and that is divine revelation, until the closing statements. And then there wasn't any time to even be thinking about going through those texts in any meaningful fashion.

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And so, there really wasn't anything to do. But what I did find interesting is that I had been sent a link on Twitter a few days earlier that had a number of anti -Reformed articles that came from the other of the two individuals who are a part of the philosophy department.

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I'm just going to have to cover Twitter up. I'm just going to have to bring it down, because I'm not looking at that anyways, and everyone's like, this is last week, it's not this week, and I'm like, well,

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I'm sorry. The other individual is Dr. Richard Davis, who has an entire page on the philosophy thing, the philosophy page there, the

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Tyndale philosophy against Calvinism. And so, I started looking at some of these articles, and I thought, you know, sometimes

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Radio Free Geneva is focused upon really bad misrepresentations of Reformed theology, which are very, very common.

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And you still need to deal with those things. You still need to deal with the really bad misrepresentations, especially when they tend to be the most common misrepresentations.

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So, if that's what you're going to be writing up against, it's sort of like when you're dealing with Islam, sometimes you have to deal with some really, really, really bad misrepresentations, and sometimes people go, why waste time on it?

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Well, because that's what's the most common. The average Muslim you talk to has a really, really, really bad understanding of what

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Christianity is all about. It's a very twisted understanding. And sometimes it can be really hard to get past that kind of prejudice and false information, things like that.

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But at the same time, sometimes the misrepresentations are garbed in doctoral degrees.

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And that's what you have here in one of the articles that I chose to look at from that particular set of pages offered by Dr.

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Richard Davis, PhD, Toronto, from the Tyndale Philosophy Group. And it's called

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Calvinism's Gospel Tautology. Now, if you know what a tautology is, it's a statement that basically states the obvious.

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It doesn't actually have any meaningful truth value to it. Circles around.

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Well, okay. That's sort of given by definition, isn't it? So Calvinism's Gospel Tautology.

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And what's interesting is the title in the link to this, and I'm wondering if I...

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Yeah, yeah. It's something called the Gospel, the Calvinism Files. And the link was actually titled

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How Calvinism Makes the Good News No News. But then when you go to the actual thing, it's

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Calvinism's Gospel Tautology, which I guess I can see the connection, but you can see why I initially clicked on that one.

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Ah, this looks good. This looks good. This is specifically on the subject of the atonement of Christ.

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Though, as is normally the case, most people who object to the doctrine of particular redemption do so because they're actually objecting to the doctrine of unconditional election.

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They're just objecting to the idea that God actually is specific in his salvific work rather than just putting out a general plan and then saying, you all do what you will with this.

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It's up to you. Which raises all sorts of questions about the nature of God's knowledge of future events and what the basis of that is and whether God has a decree.

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And I've often said it all ends up boiling down to whether you believe God has a divine decree, whether what is happening in time is in fact the result of the expression of God's will, or whether it is not.

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And so you really have to end up going back to that level for any meaningful discussion of these issues.

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And the fact that, unfortunately, the vast majority of Christians in our day do not do theology holistically.

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They do it in parts. You know, you can have people that are just absolute experts in biblical eschatology and prophecy of end times things that couldn't define or defend the doctrine of the

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Trinity if their life depended on it. That's just inappropriate. That's not how it should be.

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And we need to keep that in mind. Reformed theology always, in its final analysis, is going to require a submission to the whole revelation of God, not just to a part of it.

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And that's really its power as well. But anyway, let's take a look at Calvinism's gospel tautology.

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Before I actually read that, I want to just remind us of a text of Scripture.

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In Hebrews 9, we read, Now, I just stopped there for a moment.

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Did he or did he not obtain eternal redemption?

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Is the obtaining of eternal redemption the theoretical provision of redemption that may or may not take place for any given individual?

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Or is it an obtained real redemption in behalf of a specific people?

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There's a major conceptual difference between those two. Major difference. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living

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God? For this reason, he is a mediator of a new covenant. It goes on from there. Now, you'll notice that Hebrews 9, 14, how much more will the blood of Christ, and so you have incarnation, because if you only have a docetic sort of manifestation of a temporary physical being who's not truly incarnate, then you don't really have a sacrifice.

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Chapter 9 comes after chapter 2, obviously. There had already been the establishment of the reality of the incarnation, the reality of the human nature of Christ.

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So you have the blood of Christ and all that comes with that, who through the eternal spirit, and so now you have the son, you have the spirit, offered himself without blemish to God.

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So, I mean, right there you have the refutation of oneness theology in the clear roles of three divine persons.

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The gospel, triune. It is intentional because he offers himself without blemish to God, the

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Father. You have the cleansing of the conscience from dead works to serve the living

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God. So it is an effective, salvific act. All of this points us to the reality, and as I think about it,

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I honestly don't think I have ever seen a serious attempt on the part of opponents to the

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Reformed understanding of the atonement. I've never seen anyone really focus upon the strongest presentation, and that is that particular redemption is nothing more than the recognition of the perfect harmony of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the one salvific work of the redemption of God's people.

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In light of the Father being the source and origin of the divine decree to save these individuals,

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Ephesians chapter 1. John chapter 6. The Father has a certain people, he gives them to the

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Son, the Son brings about their perfect salvation. Ephesians chapter 1.

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Again, the Father blessed us with every spiritual blessings in Christ Jesus before the world began.

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Same concept that you have in John 6, John 10, John 17.

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What you have is the Father setting his unmerited redemptive love upon a particular people.

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He is under an obligation to set that redemptive love upon any one person or all people, either way.

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If you say that it is necessary that God set redemptive love upon any individual, you are immediately destroying the nature of grace.

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It can no longer be free. It is demanded by some sense of justice or something else.

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You've lost the idea of not only the federal headship of Adam, but you have lost the idea that there is a necessity of man's obedience to God to be able to remain in his presence.

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You've lost the entire biblical narrative. You can bring that in from all sorts of other considerations. That's what people do,

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I know. But that's the only way you can get it. That's the only way you can get it.

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You're not going to get it from the scripture itself. So the

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Father sets his redeeming love upon particular people. And let's skip over the work of the

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Son for just a moment to the work of the Spirit. The Spirit effectively raises the individual members of the elect to spiritual life at the time that He so chooses.

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If, again, you reject the biblical teaching of saving faith as a gift, if you reject the biblical teaching of the

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Spirit as having the power to raise dead sinners to life, if you are wedded to a concept of human autonomy, then you see the

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Spirit maybe attempting to save everybody, maybe attempting to equally, maybe.

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I mean, I don't know how anybody comes to that. I just don't know how anyone comes, looking at the biblical narrative in history, to the idea that the

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Spirit is striving equally with every single individual. I mean, I know where it comes from.

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It comes from the pulpits in evangelicalism today. It comes from the idea that God somehow owes us something, and therefore the

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Spirit's trying to save everyone equally. But it also comes from the

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Old Testament being decanonized in a lot of theology and, interestingly enough, in listening to the man on Unbelievable.

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I think it was Dr. Frank's on Unbelievable. When he attempted to respond to the numerous, primarily

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Old Testament passages that had been quoted to him, he did go almost the Brian Zond way of, that was how people experienced what

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God was doing. In other words, that's not really what God was doing. That's just their experience of it type thing. So, as is so often the case, the

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Arminian perspective does tend to result in a multi -layered canon of Scripture, basically.

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Because if you really believe that all Scripture is Theodenus does, then you can't just look at the

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Old Testament and go, well, no, that's stuff about heartening people so the whole people are destroyed.

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That probably didn't really happen historically. So, that was just the experience that people had, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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Well, once you do that, there isn't any reason for you to be Reformed because you no longer have a consistent biblical revelation upon which to base anything.

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So, you've got to go searching for something else, men's traditions, philosophies, whatever else. You're not going to end up with a biblical theology.

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You're not going to end up with Jesus' theology because you're no longer functioning on the basis of authority that Jesus himself taught us to function on.

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That's just, unfortunately, widely popular but massively sub -biblical.

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So, if you see, however, the Father sets his love upon a particular people, the

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Spirit effectively brings those individuals to spiritual life infallibly.

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He has the power to do that. Well, now you look at the middle, you look at the

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Son, and you go, is His work going to be consistent or inconsistent with the

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Father and the Spirit? How many people in evangelical churches, in churches that have almost any fidelity to biblical revelation as a whole, how many people do you think have ever been challenged to even think about that?

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How many people would stare at you and go, and should it be that way?

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No, certainly not. I mean, that's a basic theological question. Do the

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Father, Son, and Spirit work in perfect harmony with one another? Because the natural answer is, well, of course.

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I mean, yeah, if they're working at odds with one another, you have division within the

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Godhead itself. And we just naturally go, that doesn't sound right.

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But if you start thinking that way, then you realize, well, my theology of God should sort of determine everything else

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I believe. And so if they are working in harmony with one another, then that should be an overarching principle that I apply in everything else.

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And so if the Father has willed to redeem a particular people, then the

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Son is going to accomplish perfect redemption on their behalf.

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And then the Spirit will come and apply that at the time God decrees for their salvation.

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Well, that makes perfect sense, which for some people is what's wrong with it. I remember one fellow in seminary that we were discussing this very thing, and he was just like,

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I just don't think you can put God in that box, which was his way of saying is, I just don't think

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God acts consistently as God. Well, good luck with that. But there are some people, that's how they roll.

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That's how it works. So what is particular redemption? Particular redemption is basically the recognition that the

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Father, Son, and Spirit work consistently with one another. That if there is an elect people that God has chosen, undeservedly so, freely.

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And that's really, again, as we're going to see in this article, that's really where the problem lies. These folks just, God doesn't have the right to do that.

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God has to try to save everybody equally. If there is that divine election, then the work of atonement is going to be consistent with the scope of the election.

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And of course, if they turn an election into this, hey, anybody wants to come along, then you have to turn, since election becomes impersonal, it becomes a group rather than specifics, then the atonement has to be the same way.

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And the work of the Spirit and conviction of sin has to be the same way. You've got to work up this thing that the

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Apostles never heard of called prevenient grace to try to hold that together. And it just becomes a mess, but that's what's very, very popular.

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So, turning to the article, Christians of every stripe agree that Christ's substitutionary and atoning work on Calvary's cross is marvelous beyond comprehension.

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It is an act of unspeakable mercy, condescension, and grace on the human level, wholly unearned and uninitiated, a visible and concrete demonstration of God's love for sinners and enemies.

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As Jesus tells Nicodemus, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

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Surely this is good news, indeed the best of news, for sinful fallen humanity. Where would we be without it?

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It is a pearl of great price not to be exchanged for even the whole world. Curiously, however, one very influential theological system,

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Calvinism, bids us to pause at this juncture. Is Jesus' penal substitutionary death good news for all or just some?

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According to one of Calvinism's finest defenders, R .C. Sproul, the doctrine of limited atonement declares that the mission and death of Christ was restricted to a limited number.

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To his people, his sheep, the mission of Christ was to save the elect, chosen by God, page 206.

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The story is a familiar one. There are two groups, the elect, those who are chosen, showered with irresistible grace and consequently saved, and then there are the non -elect, intentionally not chosen, not given irresistible grace, not died for, and hence not saved.

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As Sproul sadly notes, God gives the non -elect over to their sins, in effect he abandons them to their own desires.

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End quote. Abandoned. The word just by itself, abandoned. Now, so far as it is expressed, true but insufficiently true, nothing here about the rebellion of sinners, nothing here about their love for sin, nothing here about their abuse of the good gifts of God, nothing here about the clarity of general revelation, nothing here about the suppression of the knowledge of God that is within them, nothing here about the fact that that general revelation is clear enough to hold them accountable, to give thanks and honor as God, but they don't do that.

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Their twisting of every aspect of God's revelation, the depravity of it, none of that gets mentioned. There is not a truly biblical sufficient doctrine of sin in Arminianism.

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There just isn't. It can't be. Because if there was, then they'd realize no one will ever be saved.

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Exactly. That's why God is the one who saves, not man. But when you don't have a fully biblical view of sin, you end up smuggling into your argumentation an unbiblical view of man by necessity.

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And so you end up with the idea that the elect and the non -elect, that something's being done to the non -elect that is unjust, unfair.

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That's what you're creating in the mind. That is not true, but that's what you create in the mind if you do not include the biblical revelation of man's true nature.

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Continue on. The biggest problem. Naturally, this comes as something of a shock and disappointment.

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Listen to this. To those who take Jesus at his word. His word, maybe in John 6, where he actually taught this.

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John 10, John 17. No, no, no, no. It's the old, I'm going to misunderstand

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John 3, 16 thing. God so loved the world, not some of it, but the whole thing.

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Now, once again, this is where, and if you read this article, and I'll link to it,

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I'll try to remember to link to it this afternoon when I post this. You're going to end up with a whole philosophical, logical proof argument down below where you try to turn, you basically function on the idea there cannot be a divine decree.

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God just can't do it. It's not possible to do. It's not, none of this is based on revelation.

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And the most important thing is, I've yet to find an anti -reformed

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Christian philosopher who could exegete his way out of a wet paper bag. I mean,

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I just have to say it straightforwardly. When we have gone after people like Jerry Walls and others, we've just found them to be exegetically bad.

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Really, really bad. And it does make you wonder why that is.

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Because it shouldn't of necessity be. If you're a philosopher, there are philosophers who can do meaningful exegesis.

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But it does raise the possibility that your philosophical pet perspectives end up causing you to do really bad biblical interpretation.

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Or, more likely, in many an instance, you don't really believe that the scriptures are sufficient in and of themselves to be exegetically examined to answer the big questions.

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You need to have the philosophical theories that you've come up with to answer the big questions.

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In my experience, most people who call themselves philosophers, their philosophy is their ultimate authority, not revelation from God.

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And in this instance, you have someone who should know what reformed people believe about this, but doesn't accurately represent it.

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Not some of it, but the whole thing. Yes, you're going to turn it around and say that we actually limit this solely to the elect.

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It's not the case. I was reading an article that my daughter posted.

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Well, she didn't post it. CrossPolitik posted it. I don't know if you heard about it. I only heard about it just a few minutes ago.

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But there's some Christian singer that did a song about Revelation 5.

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And Revelation 5, the song sung to the Lamb, You have redeemed men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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And that's what you've got right here. When you love

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Jew and Gentile, and that expresses the whole world in Jewish thinking, but it's even expanded more.

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Revelation 5. Tribe, tongue, people, and nation. Then that's what's here. It's not just the elect.

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It's the elect of all the world. Same thing in 1 John 2. Well, I guess this guy did a music video.

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He did an open call. Anybody who wanted to be involved in making this music video, they were all white.

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So just white folks showed up. And so he had to apologize. And they're actually thinking about starting a

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GoFundMe to reshoot the video to get it properly ethnically balanced.

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To represent things, you see. But it was an open call. It's not like he said, No, you can't. I'm not going to have these people.

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This is just the people that showed up. But that's not good enough. Not for the Christian social justice warriors.

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No, no, no. You've got to keep your ethnic lenses on.

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Look at everything. Even in the body of Christ. Oh, my goodness. So anyway, just an illustration.

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And I made a comment just before the program started. I said, I wonder if these

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Christian social justice warriors are going to complain at the freedom that God has had in the relative proportions of ethnic groups in the elect.

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I mean, are they really? Consistently, they would have to be able to demand that when you get to heaven, there needs to be the proper proportions, or God wasn't fair.

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Is God doing the math right? Up to the time of Jesus. Think about that.

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You've got the people of Israel, and you've got everybody else. And I mean, just look at the

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Jewish -Egyptian disparity there. I mean, what was God thinking? Wow.

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Evidently. Yeah, yeah, evidently, I guess. But anyway, we got off. See, Summer got me completely off track by posting that thing before the program started.

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So, we do take Jesus at his word. We just recognize that the consistent exegetical, and we're going to catch him on a really bad exegetical faux pas in John 3 here in a few minutes, but the consistent exegetical reading of all of Scripture is that that's meant for every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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And that is the world. Okay? It's one thing for provision to be made for the salvation of all.

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Notice, provision. There is a vast difference between saving and providing for salvation.

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There's a vast difference between the statement, God saves, and God makes salvation possible.

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And in the mindset here, it's only possibility. It's only potential.

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It's not actual accomplishment. That has to be a cooperative effort between God and man. The idea of monergism, the idea that God can actually save, it is not even allowed at the table from this perspective.

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Not even allowed at the table. It's one thing for provision to be made for the salvation of all, but not all to be saved, because that way you can just blame people.

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You know, God tried, and the important part of the thing is, he tried, and even if he fails, that's okay, because we all understand he did his best.

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That is a basic consequence of the fact that not all freely and willingly satisfy

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Jesus' whoever -believes condition. It's another thing entirely to say that those who don't believe were abandoned a priori, not justly.

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Notice that by abandoning their rebellion, by abandoning their positive rejection of their creator, by not recognizing that we are talking about pots here who refuse to acknowledge the potter, but instead now you've got victims.

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This works in our culture today, doesn't it? Just turn anybody into a victim, and boom.

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The mind turns off, and whatever victims say is automatically true.

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It's just, you can't even question it. So what you do here is you make the non -elect the victims of the mean

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Calvinist God, and it works. It turns people off immediately.

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It's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's beneath Christian theology,

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Christian philosophy for that matter, and it abandons all of Christian history. It's just absurd, but it works in our context today, because of the mindset that people have primarily in the

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West. It's another thing entirely to say that those who don't believe were abandoned a priori.

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Now, right there, we can stop right there. There's the falsehood. That is the falsehood that's going to be built upon and built upon and built upon to create all the silly conclusions that come forth from this.

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Before the foundation of the world, before the Son was given, and that Christ's atoning death was limited to the elect.

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So God cannot, God just cannot have a specific people. He's not allowed to do that.

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Nope, nope, nope. Can't do that. Grace can be demanded. If God created them, he's got to try to save them.

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That's just the way it is. Biblical revelation is not the source of this. This is not reasoning from biblical revelation.

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This is not looking at the example of the Old Testament and the fact that God gives his revelation to one people and the generations and generations of Amalekites and just start naming the nations around Israel, let alone far flung beyond that.

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No prophets, no nothing. Well, we don't know that.

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Yes, we do. It's right there. Think about the actual biblical narrative. To rephrase this properly would be, it's another thing entirely to say that those who would believe were freely chosen against their just deserts by God's mercy and grace, their just deserts, and that others were allowed to continue in their rebellion and receive their just deserts.

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No one receives injustice. Mercy is not a category of justice. And then it says, before the foundation of the world, well, you know, depending on how we take that text in Revelation, the lamb slain before the foundation of the world, for whom?

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For a specific individual, specific people. That Christ's atoning death was limited to the elect.

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In other words, that Christ's atoning death would be consistent with the decree of the Father and the work of the Spirit. There must be dissonance in the

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Godhead, is what we're being told. Thus, Sproul, quote, the biggest problem with limited atonement is found in the passages the

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Scriptures use concerning Christ's death for all or for the whole world. The world for whom Christ died cannot mean the entire human family.

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It must refer to the universality of the elect, people from every tribe and nation, notice people from every tribe and nation, or to the inclusion of Gentiles in addition to the world of Jews, both of which are perfectly defensible exegetical positions depending on which text you're looking at.

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You can see that the problem Sproul has in mind isn't big simply because of its theological implications.

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It's also an offense on a logical level. No, it's not. If you can't see the logic of this, then you haven't even tried to listen to the other side.

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For if Calvinism is true, all doesn't mean all. This is from PhDs, okay?

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All doesn't mean all in many places. This has been proven over and over. There's all sorts of Arminians who have said, hey guys, this is bad argumentation.

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Don't go here. It's too easy for the Calvinists to demonstrate their places where all either doesn't mean all or all means all kinds.

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It's used generically rather than universally. Guys, stop doing this. But unfortunately, their note hasn't gotten around because it's too easy to demonstrate.

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All Jerusalem went out to be baptized with John. Well, no, there were probably a few doggies and kitties left in the city when everybody else was gone.

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Actually, okay, it was all kinds of people from the upper parts and the lower parts of the social strata and everything else.

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That's what it says when all of Jerusalem went out to John to be baptized. It doesn't mean every single individual.

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That's obvious. That's obvious. So when we, you know, we could look at any one of the texts.

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We've looked at them a thousand times before. Matthew 23, 37. Peter or 1

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Timothy 2, 4, whatever. We can look at them. Demonstrate the consistency exegetically in each one of these.

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Not just assume it, but demonstrate it exegetically. It means some, the elect, depending on the context.

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Depending on the context. Jesus didn't die for the whole world. He did. Every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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But only a part of it. Well, that means we are not universalists. That's correct.

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This is indeed a problem. Only if you refuse to listen to the other side, and you do not drive your beliefs exegetically from Scripture, but from other sources.

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The believing predicate. Perhaps we can see this as follows. Consider the 3 .16

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principle. And now suppose for reductio that Sproul is right.

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This principle, taken at face value, is potentially misleading. Although 3 .16 says God loved the world and gave his son for it, this is actually false.

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No, come on, this isn't even serious. It's hard to take this seriously. It is really hard to take this seriously.

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What we're saying is that God's love is directed to the world of men.

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It will find itself. See, John 3 .16 contains within its own words particularity.

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Because who is it that receives eternal life? Is it the entire world? No, it's only those who believe.

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So there is a limitation found right within John 3 .16

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that is normally overthrown, as we're going to see by individuals like this, in this paragraph or two, by misreading the text and inserting a concept that isn't there.

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And now suppose it's actually false. God didn't and doesn't love everyone. He loves only the elect.

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So what you've done now is instead, now you have taken the world and particularized it.

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You are demanding that cosmos, in this context, must mean every single individual.

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That means you have to prove, exegetically, that the tribes, tongue, people, and nation concept, which is the same author, by the way,

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Revelation, well, some people would argue that, but most would agree, same author, that that's impossible.

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And you're going to have to argue that against the fact that you have particularity in verses 16 and 17.

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It's not going to be every single individual who ends up getting saved. How is the love of God expressed for the person who doesn't get saved by their condemnation in verse 17?

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See, we never get that. Here you've got the philosopher who is not exegeting the text.

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He's abusing the text to create a false argument against the other side.

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It's a shame to see. It really is. God didn't and doesn't love everyone.

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He loves only the elect. Well, if you mean redemptively, are you going to say that God's redemptive love for the elect who will be with him for eternity is the exact same as the love that he will maintain for the rebel sinners who are in hell for eternity?

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Same thing? God's love can't be differentiated, though ours can be. Where do we get the capacity and ability to do that if it doesn't exist in God?

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There's a philosophical question. Exegetical, too, but it's a philosophical question. If you think man has the ability to differentiate in the kinds of love we have, where do we get that ability if God doesn't have it?

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Seems to me that God would have it in far greater and perfect degree than man. Then 3 .16

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is more accurately rendered. I just love these. Sometimes Calvinists do it to Arminians, and I don't think that they should, but it's normally the

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Arminians that, out of either malice, misrepresentation, something, end up doing this.

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God so loved the elect that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

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The domain dilemma. Now we confront a dilemma. How are we to take the universal quantifier whoever?

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Does it range over the whole domain of fallen human beings? Wide scope, as the text strongly suggests, or should we restrict it in the way we restricted the world?

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Narrow scope. Well, that's where the problem lies, isn't it?

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As we have mentioned so many times before, there is no specific universal quantifier whoever.

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There is no word for whoever in John 3 .16. As we have explained over and over and over again, it is hinah, pas, ha, pishumon.

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In order of that, everyone believing. Now since no limitation is put upon it, then it is normally translated whoever.

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Only in the sense that there is no distinction in the text between believing ones.

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In other words, you don't have someone who believes, they're rejected. Someone who believes, they're accepted.

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The universal is found in the participle and the verbal action of believing.

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But the universal is that everyone believing has eternal life.

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It is not a matter of amongst those who are believing, God says,

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I'll take you, I won't take you. No. Everyone who believes receives eternal life.

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There is no whoever in the sense of a universal capacity to believe, or there is no whoever in a rejection of the existence of a divine decree.

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That cannot be established from the text. Only a person who can't read the text, its original language, would make the argument.

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Or a person who can read the original language, but their tradition is so strong, they're not bothering to see it.

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But there is no word whoever. It's pas, ha, pishumon.

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Everyone believing. And I challenge anyone to demonstrate from the language that that is not saying that the universal is based upon the action of the verbal element of the participle.

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That is, it means every believing one. Every believing one. That's where the universal aspect is.

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So this entire domain dilemma is based upon an exegetical fallacy. It is untrue.

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But we look at it anyways. Let's look at each possibility in turn. First, suppose that whoever ranges over all of fallen humanity.

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The whoever, contextually, ranges over all believing ones. It is an exegetical faux pas, face plant, to miss that.

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It's a common face plant. It's a face plant that finds its origin in human tradition.

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But it's there anyways. Both elect and non -elect. On this reading of the quantifier, 316a turns out to be false.

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To be sure, God's loving and giving his son for the elect is sufficient for their believing and having eternal life.

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There's no bearing whatsoever on the non -elect. We could argue about that. We don't have time to get into it. For abandoned to their fallen desires, they cannot believe in Christ.

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They cannot and will not. Will not. The general revelation is sufficient to hold them accountable before God.

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Notice the sneaking in of a secondary argument that is never established by exegesis.

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It's just snuck in there. God's making it so they cannot believe. No, they will not believe.

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Again, the idea is, fallen in Adam, they become incapable of doing what is right before God.

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So God must, in his mercy and grace, enable them to do so. Oh no, God must enable everybody or he's keeping someone from believing.

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Untrue. False misrepresentation. Please, Mr. Arminian people, stop misrepresenting the other side.

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I know it takes most of your arguments away, but please, stop. It's not good. Surely it would be a strange and pointless thing for Jesus to be at pains to tell

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Nicodemus that whoever of those who cannot believe does believe, these persons won't perish but have eternal life.

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See what happens when you get that far out of doing meaningful exegetical work.

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Accordingly, the best course here, it seems, would be to restrict our quantifier to the elect, which gives us God's love of the elect that he gave his only one son, that whoever of the elect believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

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So notice what he's trying to do here. We've already said world means tribes, tongues, people, a nation, whole body.

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They're trying to push that beyond what the expression itself means. Then you have the reading into the posthopistion of this other concept to now what he's trying to get around to, what he's trying to do is he's going to try to create, through symbolic logic, a tautology and say that Jesus isn't really saying anything here within Calvinism.

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It's all based, completely based, upon misrepresenting

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Calvinism, isolating this text, and reading in a way that is inappropriate to be read from the

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Reformed perspective anyways. It really does make you wonder, given the amount of time and effort put into it, how much more would be accomplished if you actually took the time to read with understanding what

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Reformed theologians have been saying since the time of the Reformation, rather than this strawmanning of stuff to create these arguments.

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On this reading, Jesus is talking about the elect straight through the verse. I wouldn't even say that.

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That's not his point. His point is, God's love is expressed toward all of humanity, all of humanity,

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Jew and Gentile, so that anyone, whether Jew and Gentile, who believes, will have eternal life.

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That's the point. By trying to force this into talking about something that Jesus isn't talking about, you create absurdities.

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It's easy to do this. The thing that's scary is, these guys don't seem to realize this kind of twisting of the text is what's used by others to attack resurrection, the atonement, the very existence of God.

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Anybody can do this with a text. That's why I would like to suggest that for any

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Christian philosophical program, one of the absolutely fundamental classes that should be required is minimally first and second year

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Greek and a class on hermeneutics. Minimally.

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Absolutely minimally. And not taught by philosophers. I think it would have a massively positive impact.

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Massively positive impact. Really, really would. It would protect you from a lot of this stuff. So, on this reading,

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Jesus is talking about the elect straight through the verse. Actually, we've already now gotten so far exegetically out of the meaning of the verse that we're out in na -na land and really are sort of done.

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This is at once balanced and consistent. Even so, it is puzzling in excelsis. Consider for a moment that final that clause, where X is

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X is elect. This is where it starts getting crazy. BX is

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X believes in him. PX is X perishes. And LX is

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X has eternal life. We can set out this elect clause as follows, and then you start getting this symbolic logic, and you're trying to create the concept of some type of tautology.

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But the only way you've been able to do that, quite honestly, is to do what Gale Riplinger did. Rig the game from the start by strawman misrepresentation of the other side and then exegetically absurd errors in the process.

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So, there's no reason to go on beyond this, because you just keep going and going and going, but once you've left a meaningful foundation, all the rest of it becomes just irrelevant bits in the cybersphere that doesn't belong there.

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So, this is the kind of stuff that's out there, and we need to think through it.

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But you'll notice, like I said, the first thought that crossed my mind, and again, there was interesting stuff.

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I appreciated the ironic spirit of both individuals involved in the unbelievable discussion.

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Don't get me wrong. I'm glad that calm conversations like that can take place.

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Michael Brown and I have calm conversations. But what was different, if you listen to Michael and I, is we weren't just sitting back going, well, you know, my position is...

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But your position, no, we think it's pretty important. And so there was,

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I don't know, it just seemed to be a whole lot more passion in our debating these issues, even respectfully, than there was there.

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But the whole thought through my mind, through the whole thing was, I did not become reformed by some kind of philosophical reflection.

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And I don't believe that anyone who does will probably stay that way. Because the foundation of Reformed theology, it is a revelation.

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I've said it over and over again. There's no reason for you to be a Trinitarian if God has not spoken with clarity in Scripture.

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And there's no reason for you to be Reformed if God has not spoken with clarity and consistency in Scripture.

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You have to have the highest... If these are parts of the highest part of God's revelation of Himself, the

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Trinity, the Gospel, nature of the Gospel, you have to have the foundation, which is a consistent revelation in divine

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Scripture. Which is why both those things have fallen on hard times in the modern day.

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Because once you lose that perspective of Scripture, that's all there is to it. So there you go, folks.

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There's a response to a tautology that doesn't exist.

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And what was the answer, as is almost always in these situations? You've got to exegete the text properly.

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You've got to start there. Anyplace else will lead you into a whirlpool of self -contradiction.

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So there's Radio Free Geneva for you today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back again, Lord willing, on Thursday.