Alana L.: 5Q (robots)
This series is based on this 14-minute video from Alana L.: 5 Signs Your Loved One is Becoming a Calvinist [About the numbering of this series: The number refers to which point Alana is on. The letter is which post it is in my series, one letter per post, but some of Alana's points get more posts/letters than others. And fyi: I re-lettered #5 to streamline it.]
Point #5 still:
Q: "Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign."
Robots?
As I said in the last post, I believe that God gave us free-will and an awful lot of room to make real decisions that affect things - because He wanted real people, real relationships, not robots.
"Oh, but we don't think people are robots controlled by God," says the Calvinist.
Oh, really? Then I must have misunderstood:
John Calvin (Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 1, chapters 16-17, bold added in all quotes): "... the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which he has destined.... the devil, and the whole train of the ungodly...[cannot do any evil or even move a finger] unless in so far as [God] permits - nay, unless in so far as he commands."
John Calvin (Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God): “... how foolish and frail [it is to suggest] that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission... It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them... Of all the things which happen, the first cause is to be understood to be His will, because He so governs the natures created by Him, as to determine all the counsels and the actions of men to the end decreed by Him..."
John MacArthur (in the Soteriology 101 clip "Preprogrammed to Believe Lies?") says that unbelievers are "preprogrammed to believe lies."
Martin Luther (The Bondage of the Will, see this section): "... [God] thus works the evils by evil men... He uses evil instruments, which cannot escape the sway and motion of His Omnipotence... the evils are done as God Himself moves... All this is fixed certainty, if we believe that God is Omnipotent!... the wicked man cannot evade the motion and action of God... [but] he must continue of necessity to sin and err..." [Notice the error, the assumption, that "omnipotent" is about how God must use His power, that He must always be using His power all the time to control/cause everything, even sin... or else He's not omnipotent. Telling God how God must act in order to be an omnipotent God is a very foolish thing to do!]
Hmm, let me see: "... move exactly in the course which he has destined....as he commands... preprogrammed... cannot escape... fixed certainty... cannot evade... must continue of necessity to sin and err..."
Sounds like a robot to me. And if that's not a robot, then I don't know what is!
"Oh," says the Calvinist, "but people aren't robots - because we do what we want to do. We make willing choices, according to our natures. So God doesn't have to 'force' us to sin. We sin because we want to sin. And so He can justly punish us for it."
Sure, sounds good, right? Kinda "free-will"?
But what most people don't realize is that "according to our natures" is the key here, what it all hinges on. It's loaded with meaning. And what it means is that the nature we get (sinner or saint, unregenerated or regenerated, evil or good) has been predetermined by/given to us by Calvi-god... and he has preprogrammed into our natures the desires he wants us to have/carry out (if he didn't, then that would mean there was something Calvi-god didn't control or foreordain, and Calvinism cannot allow that to happen)... and those desires determine what our Wills want, what we are willing to do (and they will always make us desire to do whatever he predestined)... and we must obey the desires of our Will because they're the only desires we have, and we cannot change or resist them... and so we end up making the decisions he predetermined us to make, even sinful ones. And we couldn't choose anything else because he didn't allow our Wills to have any other desires than to do what he predestined us to do.
But instead of saying all this, Calvinists simply say "according to our natures/Wills," making it sound like we are really responsible for our choices... when it's really Calvi-god.
[All Calvinism really does with all their huge, complicated theology books is put extra steps, extra distance, between Calvi-god and our sin/evil/unbelief, burying the fact that he - not we - is really responsible for our sins. They seem to think that the more links they add to the chain, the more innocent Calvi-god is.😕😖]
You see, in Calvinism we don't control our natures/Wills (or have any influence over it at all), but our preprogrammed Calvi-god-determined nature/Wills control us. [*See the note about the ESV farther below.]
"Oh, but that's not a 'robot'," says the Calvinist, "because we 'freely' make our own 'choices'."😕😖
But in Calvinism, all "freely" and "choice" means is that we are "free" to "choose" to sin because that's what sinners will inevitably "choose" to do, "free" to follow our Calvi-god-determined desires and to choose what he predestined us to choose, and only what he predestined us to choose. All "our own choices" means is that we did it, not someone else - not that we had any ability to choose something else - even though it was all predestined/orchestrated by Calvi-god.
From R.C. Sproul (God and Sin): "We are endowed with freedom to act according to our nature. Because our nature is fallen, depraved, and sinful, apart from the grace of God we freely sin... Because of our depravity, apart from God's grace, we can only act in rebellion and are responsible for our sins."
Some "freedom," huh? Only able to act as your Calvi-god-determined nature tells you to act. Only able to sin. Unable to choose anything but sin, anything but the one thing Calvi-god determined we'd do in any given moment. Unable to change our desires or natures (or have any influence over our Wills/desires/thoughts/behavior) unless and until "the grace of [Calvinism's] God" changes it for us.
But, yeah, sure, let's call that "freedom."😕
And, of course, let's say that sinners are truly and totally "responsible" for their sins and "deserve" to be punished, as if they had any real choice to do anything else or any ability to resist committing the predestined sins. Let's punish the robot for what the programmer created it to do.😕😕😕
In Systematic Theology, chapter 32, Wayne Grudem says "... someone might object that if a choice is ordained (or somehow indirectly caused) by God, it may appear to us to be voluntary and willed by us, but it is nonetheless not a genuine or real choice because it is not absolutely free. (Amen, yes, that is the logical way to see it.) Once again we must respond by challenging the assumption that a choice must be absolutely free in order to be genuine or valid. If God makes us in a certain way and then tells us that our voluntary choices are real and genuine choices ["If we Calvinists tell you that these are voluntary, real, genuine choices, even when they're clearly not..."], then we must agree that they are. [Gaslighting and manipulation! Grudem is essentially telling us that we need to simply accept Calvinism’s illogical, contradictory nonsense that forced, predestined choices are really free, real, voluntary choices because (paraphrased) “God said so, and God doesn’t have to make sense. God can be illogical and contradictory because He's God and gets to decide what’s real.” Grudem (as all Calvinists do) stamps God's name on their nonsense and then tells us that we have to accept it because “God is God.” So much manipulation. Cult-like manipulation.]
... According to this objection, if God really ordains (or indirectly causes) everything that we choose with regard to salvation, then we are no longer real persons. Once again it must be answered that God has created us [yes, but not in the way Calvinists think, which is where they go wrong] and we must allow him to define what genuine personhood is [yes, Calvinists, we must - without built-in Calvinist biases and presumptions. Which means that if the Bible teaches that humans have free-will, then you must accept it].
The analogy of a 'puppet' or 'robot' reduces us to a subhuman category of things that have been created by man. But genuine human beings are far greater than puppets or robots because we do have a genuine* will and we do make voluntary* decisions based on our own* preferences and wants. We are free* to choose whatever we most want to choose*."
See? Calvinists use words like "genuine, voluntary, our own, free, choice," even though they mean something very different from how most normal people would commonly use those words.
We would mean that people really get a choice among various options, that God lets us choose. But they mean that God lets us choose what He predestined us to choose, that He lets us obey the desire to sin that He built into our natures/Wills (a desire we must obey), and that everything we do has been predetermined, caused, orchestrated by God.
When they say "genuine Will," they don't mean it's a genuinely free Will or that we have any kind of control over it, which is how most of us would think of it. They just mean it's a Will that exists, even though it's controlled by Calvi-god. (It's like the difference between saying a gem is real as in an authentic gem from the earth... and saying that it's "real" as in it exists, even though it's a fake.)
When they say "we freely make our own choices/voluntary decisions, we are free to choose whatever we most want to choose," they don't mean that we have the ability to choose between multiple options, to determine what we want, to resist doing whatever we do, or to choose something else. They just mean that we "freely/voluntarily" follow our strongest desires - irresistible desires that Calvi-god first preprogrammed in us - and we couldn't choose anything else.
When they say "our own preferences and wants," they don't mean that we get to pick them or change them. They just mean that those are the preferences and wants of our particular nature/Will, not someone else's, even though they've been determined by and given to us by Calvi-god.
Their use of "genuine, voluntary, our own, free, choice" is very deceptive, tricking us into thinking they're saying something they're not, that they support a certain level of true free-will, when they really don't. [And honestly, I think it's also their attempt to make themselves more comfortable with their contradictory theological views, tricking themselves into thinking it makes sense and fits the Bible, when it really doesn't... tricking themselves into thinking it doesn't hurt God's character and trustworthiness, when it really does.]
[I'm not debating here the idea that unrepentant sinners are still in the sin-nature and that they will sin because they have no regenerated nature to give them the godly desires to please God and live by His Word. What I am debating is Calvinism's idea that "total depravity" equals "total inability," that God predetermined which nature we get and which sinful desires we get and what sins we commit and that there's nothing we can do about it, that we get no choice about it and have no ability to change/resist it and no ability to choose to repent/believe/obey without God causing us to. Calvinism takes the idea of being a slave to the sin-nature to an unbiblical, extreme level, as they do almost every other theological concept.]
Regardless of whatever deceptive words they use, Calvinists never mean that we have any influence/control over our desires/Wills or that we have the ability to choose what we want to do among various real options that are truly available to us.
But they always mean that our Calvi-god-given desires/Wills control us, that we can only decide to do what Calvi-god preprogrammed us to do.
John Piper (How does God's sovereignty not violate our decision-making?): "This deep evil in all human hearts does not limit the complete sovereignty of God over all things, including the fallen human will... God is profoundly, thoroughly in control of the fallen will of man... Like slavery to sin, [our new slavery to God, after regeneration] is completely willing. We are not controlled or coerced against our desire or against our will, but by means of new and powerful desires."
He's confirming that, in Calvinism, our Calvi-god-given desires control us, making us "willing" to do what he predetermined us to do, which is why he doesn't have to "coerce" us to do these things "against our Will/desires."
Well, of course we don't sin "against our Will/desires" when Calvi-god first preprogrammed our Will/desires to want to sin.
If I gave some guy a magic potion that gave him only the desire to throw mud at people - that's all he could want to do, so that's all he could choose to do, and he can't resist or change that desire - then of course he isn't throwing mud at people "against his Will." He "wants" to throw mud, and so I don't have to physically force him to throw mud. All I have to do is let him be, let him do what his nature has been programmed to want to do, and he will continue to throw mud all on his own. And when the Calvi-cops catch him, they will hold him - not me - responsible for throwing mud at people because he "wanted" to do it, because he "chose" to follow his greatest desire (never mind how he got that desire in the first place).
This is Calvinism's kind of "freedom" and "voluntary" and "choice" and "deserves to be punished for doing it."
But most normal people would not call this "free" at all. Nor "justice."
Most would see it for what it is: Robots. Puppets. Forced to do what they were programmed to do, for what they had no real choice about or control over, and then unjustly punished for it.
[*Sidenote about the ESV: I'll get into this more in another post in this series, but I want to show you three verses where the Calvinist ESV words things very differently from the KJV in order to support their idea that our Wills control us, that we must do whatever our Calvi-god-programmed Wills cause us to want to do:
1. John 7:17 in the KJV: "If any man will do [God's] will ..."
But in the ESV: "If anyone's will is to do God's will ..."
In the KJV, the first "will" is a verb, it's what we do. We either choose to do or not do God's Will. We determine it. But the ESV changes it from a verb to the noun "Will," changing it from man being in control over his own decisions... to man's Will being in control over him and determining what he decides. Very different. Very Calvinist. In Calvinism, we either do or do not get - from Calvi-god - the Will to do his Will. And then we do whatever our preprogrammed Will tells us to do.
2. 1 Corinthians 7:37 in the KJV: “Nevertheless, he that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will …”
But here is the ESV: “But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control …”
In the KJV, the man does the steadfast standing and has power over his own Will. He has control over it. He does it. But in the ESV, both are passive, as if it happens to the man (by Calvi-god, of course): The man's heart is established and desire under control... but not necessarily by him. It just happens to him, without his decision or control. And notice the ESV completely eliminates the idea of the man having power over his own Will - changing it to having his desire under control, but not necessarily by him. Passive! It's similar to the difference between saying “I painted my house” (KJV) and “I had my house painted” (ESV). In the KJV, we do it. But in the ESV, it happens to us.
3. Hosea 5:4 in the KJV: "They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God..."
But the ESV says "Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God..."
In the KJV, the people decide (have control over) whether they turn to God or not: They will not do what they need to do to turn to God, even though they could. But in the ESV, their deeds (predetermined, caused, orchestrated, controlled by Calvi-god, of course) control the people: Their deeds won't let them turn to God.
And these kinds of changes are all over the ESV!]
[The posts in this series will be added to the "Alana L." label as they get published.]
