Leaving Calvinism: Comments from Ex-Calvinists #2

Here is the next batch of ex-Calvinist testimonies (and those who never were Calvinists but who came face to face with it) from this post: X-Calvinist Corner.  (It's an Arminian website, but I am not Arminian.)  I am going to highlight some of the comments that stood out to me the most.  If I add any comments of my own, it will be [blue and in brackets].  I made minor corrections for better grammar and punctuation.  If you want to read everything that everyone said, click on the link above:

Patti Haider says:

... and [I] noticed that ”correct doctrine” in Calvinist circles was held in higher importance than preaching the Good News.  I gradually began to understand that according to Calvinism the Good News wasn’t so good.  Actually, unless you were one of the” elect”, it was bad news.… and the more hardened of a Calvinist that preached or expounded, the more I became concerned about the nature of my loving God.... 

I really became distressed over it all until one fine day, the Lord showed me that the Gospel, as He said, is for those who will accept the Good News as a child.  What a child can understand about Jesus’ love offer is all that really needs to be known to find salvation  [What a brilliant bit of insight!  And it's so contrary to the lofty, high-minded, months-of-research, theologically-elite Calvinists.] ... 

My final observation between Calvinism and other doctrinal slants on the Gospel is this: I looked at the life of John Calvin and John Wesley, and tried to consider how each lived and how each expressed the Love of Christ.  Without a doubt, John Wesley’s life expressed profound love and determination to win souls for Christ.  But John Calvin aimed at correcting wrong doctrine and establishing God’s rule here on Earth [by legalistic, violent force, Click here and here to see.  Does this sound like a godly man to you?].  He struck me as a hard man.  When I read Calvinism, it strikes me as the new Phariseeism, all calculation and addition and subtraction.  [She is right on the mark!]

Arminian says:

... But I came under the influence of a campus minister who was a Calvinist.  He convinced me to embrace Calvinism with the usual types of proof texts.  But it did not sit right with me.  It conflicted with so much that the Bible says.  I became depressed as the clear and certain implications of [Calvinist] theology was that God has created most people to torture them forever in Hell, and this somehow is what glorifies him.  I found it difficult to pray.  But I did come to the point where I truly desired that if it would most glorify God to send me to Hell, then that he do so.  

[This is so tragically sad, that someone would think their eternal damnation would glorify God, that He wants them to be eternally damned - when eternal damnation is exactly what Jesus died to save us from!  Talk about flipping the Gospel, God's character, and Jesus's sacrifice on its head!  What a wicked, wicked theology!]

Daniel Gracely says:

I remember disagreeing [when I was a Calvinist] with my Dad and/or uncle, both of whom were ordained ministers, arguing in effect that God could only have foreknowledge about “whatsoever comes to pass” if He had also predestined all events in all their minutia.  

[Calvinists think "foreknowing" is "fore-planning," that God only knows what will happen because He planned it to happen that way.  This is a fundamental flaw in their theology, and it essentially destroys what foreknowledge really is and it limits God's abilities.  

Besides, if God only knows what will happen because He preplanned it, and if He preplans everything that happens, how could He know of alternative futures that would have happened if people had made different decisions: 1 Samuel 23:9-13, 1 Samuel 13:13-14?  How could He have plans that didn't happen, and how could people do things without His approval or consent: Hosea 8:4, Isaiah 30:1, Jeremiah 18:7-8, Jeremiah 19:4-5, 1 Kings 20:42, Matthew 23:37?  Why would He foil the plans of the nations - Psalm 33:10 - if He Himself first preplanned that they would have those plans?  And then what are we to make of God's promise to destroy Nineveh in 40 days unless they repented?  If Calvinism is true then either God would have had to destroy Nineveh (the people could not have repented) because that's what He said He planned to do, or He'd have to be a liar for saying that He was going to destroy them when He really preplanned not to.  

Calvinism makes a mess of God's Word and trustworthiness!  

Just because God knows the future doesn't mean He preplanned it that way or caused it to happen that way or that nothing different could have happened.  These are Calvinist presuppositions which destroy what foreknowledge really is and which, in turn, destroy God's character and Word.] ... 

Ironically, not too long after this I began to question my Calvinism.  Numerous Calvinists ... have stated that whatsoever comes to pass HAS to come to pass, because God ordained it that way.  Thus these authors conclude that every event COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN OTHERWISE.  This assumption was the first one I questioned, and it happened one day as I read Matthew 11:21.  There Jesus claimed events could have been different for Tyre, Sidon, Sodom, and Gommorah, because those peoples would have responded differently had they seen His miracles.  In other words, Jesus was saying that other histories could have been possible.  Think about that.  Yet Calvinists not only claim that God decrees everything, but that He does it FOR HIS PLEASURE.  Yet if that were true, why was Jesus upset with Bethsaida and Chorazin, since God (according to Calvinism) was predestining their responses?  There are other examples, too.  [See Isaiah 65:12.  If Calvi-god does everything for his pleasure, why is he causing people to choose what displeases him?  Is he a sadomasochist, one who gets pleasure out of causing pain for himself and others?  Why does He say in Lamentations 3:33 that He does not inflict pain willingly?]  If God’s will was always being wrought during Jesus’ ministry, why did Jesus weep for Jerusalem?  Or again, if John Piper is right in claiming that man is “ultimately not self-determinative,” who is it that quenches the Spirit?  [In Calvinism, it would have to be that the Spirit ultimately quenches Himself.]  Numerous other examples could be given.

Indeed, Calvinism is so fraught with these kind of logical problems that Calvinist apologists, without exception, resort to justifying their theology upon these very contradictions, while of course denying that such ARE contradictions.  I take a cue from George Orwell, and refer to this approach as DOUBLETHINKING.  In layman’s terms, this means that every one of Calvinism’s definitions describing the nature of God, man, good, and evil, actually contradicts itself.  This is why Piper, in the end, has to tell Calvinist disciples not to rely on logic or experience to explain Calvinism... 

[BINGO!  I have seen many times when Calvinists tell people that they can't rely on human logic because Calvinism won't be in line with human logic.  "But," they say, "it's in line with the Bible and so you just have to accept it and not question God."  Do you see what's going on here?  The dangers in this?  

If they can get you to set aside logic, to think that illogical things are biblical truth and that biblical truth is illogical, then they can get you to accept anything they tell you.  This is how cults brainwash people.  

But does any of this sound like how God operates, how He expects us to be, especially given that He is constantly warning us to test the spirits and be discerning about what people teach us about the gospel?  How can we be discerning if we are not allowed to use logic?  

Of course, we should never let our human wisdom overrule what God clearly, plainly says, and there will be things that don't make sense to us and that we just have to take on faith (Who can truly understand the Trinity?  Or what it was like for Jesus to be fully man and fully God?  Or what the 6 days of creation really looked like?).  But Calvinism is not based on what God clearly, plainly said.  Calvinism obscures, contradicts, and confuses what God clearly, plainly said.  And therefore, it should not be accepted on faith.  It should be carefully examined, evaluated, and critiqued.  And if it contradicts what God clearly, plainly said (and it does!), it needs to be tossed out!  

Is God an illogical God?  A God of chaos and confusion?  A God who says one thing but means another, as Calvinism teaches?  Or is He a straightforward God who operates by rules of logic and reason, and who can be trusted to say what He means and mean what He says?  One of these Gods can be trusted; the other one can't.]  

Fundamentally, Calvinism always turns meaning on its head.  This is why the debate revolving around Calvinism never dies.  Calvinism is able to offer philosophically irrational responses while remaining consistent [within their Calvinist construct], and many people assume that consistency of argument proves a position’s truthfulness....

... REALIZE THAT A CALVINIST AND NON-CALVINIST DO NOT SHARE THE SAME MEANING OF WORDS.  [Such as, Calvinists redefine "foreknowledge" to be "fore-planned" ... "choice/free-will" means "you can only desire to make (only 'choose' to make) the one choice God predestined you to make" ... "abundant grace" means "saving grace only for the elect, but food and sunshine for the non-elect while they are on earth, before being sent to hell for being the unbelievers God predestined them to be" ... "whosoever believes" means "not everyone can believe, but only the elect can and will believe" ... "the world/all people" means "not all individual people, but all kinds of people, the elect from all different nations" ... "believe" means "you have no choice about believing in Jesus, but God causes the elect - and only the elect - to believe in Him, and no one else can believe" ... "Seek Me" (God's commands, from the Bible) means "you cannot seek Him on your own, until and unless God causes you to do it, and only if you are one of the elect" ... "human responsibility" doesn't mean that you make your own decisions but that "you will still be held accountable for doing what God predestined you to do" ... "sovereign" means "God preplans, controls, causes all things, even sin" (when in reality, sovereign is about the position of power God holds, about Him being the highest, ultimate power there is over all, but it's not about how He has to use His power.  But Calvinists have decided that God must always be using His sovereign power all the time to preplan, control, cause everything, even sin and evil ... or else He can't be a sovereign, all-powerful God.  I don't think God will take kindly to being told how He has to act in order to be God, especially when He's shown in His Word that He operates very differently than Calvinists say He does.).  Calvinists have a secret, different meaning for every biblical term and idea you would agree with, which contradicts the biblical, commonsense meaning of these words.  They want you to think they are saying one thing (such as that they agree with free-will and choice), when they are really saying the opposite.  And this is how they suck many people into Calvinism without them even realizing it.] ...

As a Calvinist rider [riding the back-and-forth, "rocking horse" theology of Calvinism], I would throw my weight forward toward my belief in the absolute sovereignty of God until I could go no further, whereupon I would recoil backwards toward my belief in human freedom.  Thus I would go back and forth in seesaw motion, lest on the one hand I find myself accusing God of insufficient sovereignty, or on the other hand find myself accusing God of authoring sin.  All the while, there remained an illusion of movement towards truth, when in fact there was no real movement at all.  At length I would allow the springs of dialectical tension to rest the rocking horse in the center, and then I would declare as harmonious propositions that were, in fact, totally contradictory to each other.  Calvinist riders still ride out this scenario. This is why, among the Calvinistic writings of Van Til, Sproul, Boettner, A.W. Pink, etc., there are no unqualified statements about the absolute sovereignty of God or the free will of man.  If one reads long enough, all-forthright statements about them are eventually withdrawn by qualifying each statement with its exact opposite thought.  

[He is right on!  As I've heard it said of Calvinists (and have seen for myself): What they take out with one hand, they later sneak back in with the other.  What they give with one hand, they later remove with the other.  Basically, they talk out of both sides of their mouths while denying that they do it, telling you that you can't use logic to figure it out anyway and so you should just trust them.  "Who are you, O man, to talk back to God anyway?"] ...

Now observe that another striking example of doublethinking is when Calvinists use the word ‘choice.’  Calvinists will say (in defense of total depravity) “Man has choice, but he can only choose evil.”  But readers will note that this is merely a sophisticated way of saying that man has a choice that is not a choice.  For obviously if a man can only ‘choose’ one thing, it is not really a choice at all.  Yet this is where the Calvinist throws his weight backward on the rocking horse of his theology, insisting that we don’t really understand his position, and that he DOES believe in choice.  Sproul, for example, cites the ‘explanation’ given by Augustine, i.e., that man has freedom, but he had no liberty.  Now in the common world, the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are synonyms.  But in the Calvinist world, these two words are defined as opposites to justify Calvinism’s doublethink.  This is a trick that has fooled many people into becoming Calvinists....

[Also see my post "When Calvinism's 'Bad Logic' Traps Good Christians."]