"Well yes, but actually no"

 

































Most Popular Posts Of The Month:

List of Calvinist Preachers, Authors, Theologians, Websites, etc.

I  found a lot more names to add to my list of known Calvinists (found in my various "How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist" posts).  [FYI: I added a note at the bottom of this post on May 5, 2021.]    And so here it is, a "master list" of known Calvinists to help you be careful and discerning about who you listen to and where you get your theology from.  There are plenty more Calvinists out there, but these are just the names that I ran across the most.   These are either definite, self-professed Calvinists or "most likely Calvinists," in my estimation.  (I haven't heard of most of them, but it's good to know their theology before I do.)   After finding these names in various places online, I looked up each person to see if they are Calvinist.  If they did not self-identify as a Calvinist, I tried to figure it out based on the statements of faith of the groups/churches they belong to, the books they write, the t...
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Things My Calvinist Pastor Said #15: No Altar Calls, And Replacing "Believe" With "Repent"

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(This "Things My Calvinist Pastor Said" series is a breakdown of this much longer post:  "We Left Our Church Because of Calvinism,"  which was written last year but updated July 2020.  All memes were created with  imgflip .) Updated October 2023 15.    Our pastor never does altar calls and never asks people if they want to ask Jesus in their heart or choose Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  Instead, Calvinists emphasize the need to "repent."             As I mentioned in the last point, w ith Calvinism in general, there are no altar calls, no "Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart, to choose Him as your Lord and Savior?"                They say it's because they don't want people thinking they're saved just because they "walked the aisle" or "prayed a prayer."  But I know it's because they don't want people thinking they have a choice.  Because that would contr...
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"But Calvinists don't say God causes sin and evil!"

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If you point out to Calvinists that Calvinism's view of sovereignty - that God fore-ordains and orchestrates everything that happens and we had no ability to do anything differently - makes God the cause (and truly the only  voluntary cause) of all sin and evil, they'll probably respond with something like "That's not what we're saying.  You're putting words in our mouths.  And you don't understand Calvinism."   When they do that, show them a few of these quotes -  Ca lvinists' own words about their beliefs of God's sovereignty and how He preplans, wills, ordains, orchestrates, directs, controls (code-words for "causes")  everything  that happens.   And then ask them if they still think you're really misunderstanding them.  (Bold emphasis added)   [Note: Even "foreknows" means "causes" in Calvinism, because Calvi-god only foreknows what will happen because he first predetermined it would happen, and then he ca...
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"Things My Calvinist Pastor Said" Conclusion: Our Resignation From Our Church

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(This "Things My Calvinist Pastor Said" series is a breakdown of this much longer post:  "We Left Our Church Because of Calvinism,"  which was written last year but updated July 2020.  All memes were created with  imgflip .) Conclusion: Anyway, it's finally final.  We sent our resignation letter in yesterday, simply stating that "due to strong doctrinal disagreements with the head pastor, we are resigning from our membership here."   We've been at that church for almost 20 years.  We've found some good friends there, raised our kids together, loved inviting people to visit our church with us, been part of some great programs, etc.  It's really been a great church.  One of the best and most biblical in the area.   And then this pastor came in with his Calvinism.  And after several years of being angry with his  manipulative tactics  and his  twisted-Gospel  which  turns God into an illog...
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Leaving Calvinism: Comments from Ex-Calvinists #11

Here is the last of the ex-Calvinist testimonies.  The first one is 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 you want to read everything that everyone said, click on the link above: Dana Steele writes: I grew up in a Calvinistic Baptist church from age 11.  The 5-points of Calvinism (TULIP) were taught regularly with great enthusiasm ... But it wasn’t until college that I began to understand and embrace the “Doctrines of Grace” and TULIP more fully....  I also learned to love the doctrine of election because it meant that God loved me personally and specifically in a unique way.  Though it made me a little embarrassed to think that God did not love everyone this way, I was content to leave this as a mystery.  Who am I to question God?  I was just glad I was one of the lucky (I mean chosen) ones. ... [As ...
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The 9 Marks of a Calvinist Cult

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[For the shortened version of this post,  click here .  For the tiniest version, click here .  And since this whole post will take you about 3 hours to read, h ere are links to the individual chapters:  #1 deception  ...  #2 hidden agendas  ...  #3 multiple layers  ...  #4 strategic tactics  ...  #5 isolation/control  ...  #6 fear/coercion  ...  #7 mind-control/thought-reform  ...  #8 gaslighting  ...  #9 authoritarian narcissists  ...  conclusion and links ] A  Psychology Today article -  Understanding Cults: The Basics  - shares some characteristics of cults and how they operate (my paraphrase; I've condensed some of them here to three main points):  1. No one knowingly, voluntarily joins a cult, but they are "recruited" into it by cult leaders who take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the recruits, using deception and manipulation to suck them in. 2. ...
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How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist (simplified version)

(For the extended version of this post, which I recommend, click here .  It is loaded with lots more information.  This simplified one is just the highlights.  And feel free to copy this and share it with others, to help them learn to identify Calvinism when they see it.  Just make sure to share the link to this blog so that they can find the original post.  Thank you.  New : For the super-short version, click here .  And FYI: I found a couple times when the Calvinist author of an article I linked to changed their article after I linked to it.  So if their article doesn't seem to match what I said about it, it may be because they altered it. ) We just left our church of almost 20 years because of the dogmatic Calvinist pastor who recently came on board.  ( Read my "Letter to Our Elders Regarding Calvinism Growing in Our Church" here.)   And I was thinking about what precautions I might take to make sure we didn't end up in another...
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"Neo-Calvinism vs. The Bible" - Andy Woods

This is just a quick post to share a series from Andy Woods against Calvinism: Neo-Calvinism vs The Bible | Andy Woods Ministries I've only listened to the first three so far, but I found this one quite intriguing:   Neo-Calvinism vs. The Bible 003 | Andy Woods Ministries In that one, he gets a little into the Catholic roots of Calvinism and the errors of Calvinism related to prophecy.  As he says, Luther didn't believe Revelation was inspired by God (and he considered it satanic to take end-times' prophecy literally), and this explains why many Calvinist churches don't address prophecy much.   And he also says that Calvin believed in amillennialism.  And to me, this would explain why the EFCA - which I believe has been taken over by Calvinists - removed the belief in premillennialism from their statement of faith, allowing for pastors to preach things like amillennialism. He also gets into the damage that Lordship Salvation - with John MacArthur at the for...
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Is The ESV (English Standard Version) a Calvinist Bible?

Just in case anyone missed this post (the longer title made it easy to miss the "ESV" part) ... "A Random Verse That Destroys Calvinism (And "Is The ESV a Calvinist Bible?") In that post, I write about a bunch of verses that I believe were intentionally translated to be more Calvinistic or based on manuscripts that were too corrupt to be trusted (click on it to see the verses).   And why would I think that the translators of this Bible version would do that? (From that post...) The ESV and ESV Study Bible are majorly preferred by Calvinists.  In fact, it's often considered "The Calvinist Bible."   Why?  And why would translators of a Bible make these kinds of Calvinist tweaks to Scripture? Wayne Grudem and J.I. Packer were editors on the  ESV Study Bible   (this is for the ESV Global Study Bible).  Grudem and Packer are both popular, strong, dogmatic Calvinists.  Very Big Names in the world of Calvinism.  Grudem in the General E...
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Only.me80 #7: MacArthur 3 ("will"/author/ESV)

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I'm planning on publishing posts every other week for awhile, but I'll occasionally publish one in between.  So here is footnote #3 on John MacArthur's sermon about Limited Atonement that I quoted in  part 4 .   Apparently, it's gonna take quite a long time to get through all my footnotes, something I didn't plan on when I first started writing this series which was  inspired by a comment from a Calvinist reader called Only.me80 (see  part 1 ) .  Yes, this whole long series sprang from that short little comment.  And  here is  part 2 ...   part 3 ...  part 5 ... and part 6 .   *3  Notice the phrasing MacArthur used:  " the sinner cannot will to believe on his own, since he can only believe if God enables him to believe."   It's not just "cannot believe," but  "cannot will to believe."    And he used this kind of phrasing earlier too:  "if they'll only will to believe." ...
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