The Anti-Calvinist Rant

I believe that many - if not most - Calvinists are Calvinists simply because they think it means believing that God is sovereign.  They say "Well, I believe God is sovereign, so I guess I'm a Calvinist then."  (I think this is how many people get trapped in Calvinism.) And so they think that if you aren't a Calvinist or if you are an anti-Calvinist (as I am!), then you do not believe that God is sovereign, that you are rejecting God's authority and control, that you are elevating yourself above God. But this is not necessarily true.  Many of us anti-Calvinists are not anti-God's-sovereignty; we are simply against the Calvinist's misunderstanding of sovereignty. You see, Calvinism defines sovereignty as God must cause and control everything that happens, that nothing can happen that He doesn't actively cause.  And so therefore, there can be no free-will.  People cannot have the ability to make decisions because if there is one decision that God d...

In a post at Soteriology 101 (I can't remember which post though), I responded to a comment by someone named Cynthia.  If I remember correctly, she was sharing that she had been hurt by dogmatic, condescending Calvinist leaders at her church and that she had to leave her church because of it.  She also commented on Calvinist pastors doing altar calls and on the contradiction of Calvinists evangelizing and doing missions work and trying to draw people closer to Jesus, when they essentially believe that we have no free-will and that God's already decided everything and that He alone controls everything .   These are things I have thought about too.   Our Calvinist pastor is really enthusiastic about missions work, and I couldn't figure out why.  It was perplexing to me how someone who believes that God controls all we do, that we have no free-will, and that everything has already been predestined could also believe in evangelism, as if evangelizing could ...