For anyone reading this blog
post, you may want to visit this link “Open Question
to Presuppositionalists” before continuing. You see, I am a
Calvinist and a Presuppositionalist and it is my honest desire to know the
truth as God has revealed it in Scripture and I will follow God’s Word wherever
it leads. Can you see the difference between me and Spencer? Spencer says he
will follow the evidence wherever it leads. But I sort of think if that were
really the case, Spencer would be a Calvinist and a Presuppositionalist.
Spencer begins with the following
statement:
“That being said, It is my
understanding that according to the Calvinistic interpretation of Scripture,
human reasoning is so totally depraved that any effort to understand or believe
the Gospel is futile. Unless and until the Holy Spirit regenerates the
reprobate mind, a person will continue to suppress the truth regardless of how
well it is articulated or argued for.”
Rom. 1:18 For the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by
their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Rom. 1:21 For although they knew
God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile
in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Rom. 1:25 because they exchanged
the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather
than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
1 Cor. 1:17-18 For Christ did not
send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent
wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of
the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God.
1 Cor. 1: 21 For since, in the
wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God
through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
1 Cor. 2:4-5 and my speech and my
message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of
the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the
wisdom of men but in the power of God.
Rom. 8:7-8 For the mind that is set
on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law;
indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
So, I suppose that we
Presuppositionalists do in fact believe that the doctrine of total depravity
involves the fall and subsequent corruption of the intellect. Yes, we do affirm
this truth but only because the Scriptures seem to clearly affirm this
truth. The evidence from Scripture clearly indicates that human reason sets
itself over against God and his divine revelation in Scripture, not just by way
of volition, but because of its very nature. You see, the Calvinist knows that
this is not just an epistemic concern, it is an ontological one. The two are
interdependent.
Statement #2:
“In addition, the Calvinistic
view of God’s sovereignty entails that God causally ordains all things that
come to pass. There is no sense in which God merely “permits” things to occur.
Everything that comes to pass, to include the unbelief of the reprobate, comes
to pass because in so happening God will bring the most glory to Himself.”
Most Calvinists would say that what God permits he permits efficaciously. This means that God never permits x and x fails to happen. Whatever God permits, happens. To say otherwise is to end in a denial of God’s sovereignty, or it is to end with an incoherent system of belief. Neither option is very attractive.
Statement #3:
Here in lies a problem I don’t
believe the Presuppositionalist will be able to get out of. Obviously, I
understand that the Calvinist believes that God ordains means as well as ends.
He has not revealed the content of His Divine Decree to us and therefore we are
only accountable to what He has revealed in Scripture (i.e. preaching the
Gospel to everyone since we are commanded to and we do not know the identities
of the elect). Still, while an understanding of this may lead to a Calvinist
carefully weighing the decisions he makes in the future, he still must
acknowledge that all events in the past have occurred the way they did due to
the Sovereign Decree of God.
Uh, amen. If past events occurred
any other way than by the Sovereign Decree of God, that would mean that God is
not sovereign in any meaningful sense of the word ‘sovereign.’ This is directly
linked to the Enlightenment influence of deism that infects the modern churches
and seminaries today.
Statement #4:
This being said, I would like you
to consider someone like Dr. Frank Turek who is not a Calvinist and uses the
Classical Apologetics method. Based on the admission of Reformed theologians
themselves, it seems to me that a Calvinist has to believe that ultimately the
reason that Dr. Turek is in error regarding God’s Sovereignty and the proper
apologetic method is because God has not granted it to him to understand these
things. Just as the reprobate man’s fallen reason can never lead him to God,
neither can Dr. Turek’s reason lead him to the truth of Reformed theology
unless and until the Holy Spirit grants it to him to understand it. If Dr.
Turek persists in his error, he does so only because God has sovereignly
determined before the foundation of the world that he would be in error, for
through Dr. Turek’s theological errors God will bring the most glory to
Himself.
This is essentially a red
herring. We are not dealing with God’s secret counsel. We are dealing with
God’s revealed will in Scripture. We are moving, speaking, and acting according
to God’s Word. What Spencer has done is create a straw man of hyper-Calvinism
and attempted to paint it as Calvinism. He is either being unethical in
his approach or he is ignorant of the differences between hyper-Calvinism and Calvinism. Neither option is very attractive. Hyper-Calvinism does exactly what
Spencer talks about. Historic Calvinism repudiates such thinking. Spencer
should realize this and that raises the question as to what he is doing in this
paragraph.
Spencer then launches into a role
play scenario between a classical apologist and a presuppositional apologist.
The scenario is about as poor an attempt to defend the Classical approach as I
have seen. This too is a red herring. What does Scripture say? I listed several
Scriptures that clearly teach us that unregenerate human reason is a hostile
enemy of God and is not only unwilling to see and accept the truth of God, it
is unable to do so. What we need is for Spencer, if he wants to refute
Calvinism and Presuppositional apologetics, to provide an exegesis of those
texts that stands up to the test of the rest of Scripture.
Statement #5:
CA: “But if that’s the case how
could you ever confidently know that anything you believe is true? I suspect
you’ll say because God has revealed it to you, but that would just be arguing
in a circle. You just admitted that if God wants someone to be in error then
they will certainly be in error, including me and including you! How can you
know that what God has revealed to you isn’t an error so that He can bring more
glory to Himself by your being incorrect?”
Now, Spencer seems to be terribly
confused for one thing. He seems to be suggesting that if God’s decree is
unknowable, and orthodox Christianity has affirmed from the beginning that it
most certainly is unknowable, then skepticism wins the day. Spencer wants to
force us to accept a God who is either unknowable or one that is not sovereign.
The God Spencer seems to be positing is not sovereign. The God Spencer claims
the Calvinist believes in is actually unknowable. Spencer hangs all our
knowledge of God on knowing the secret counsel of God. He fails to take into
consideration that we are not just talking about knowing what God says and when
God acts. We are talking about knowing God. We can know that God has not left
us in error precisely because we have assurance that God reveals himself to us
through Scripture. Moreover, the principle that Scripture is self-interpreting
protects us from ourselves.
I always turn to Jer. 31:31-34
for my epistemology:
“Behold, the days are coming,
declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of
Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made
with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of
the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,
declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the
house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law
within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God,
and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his
neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all
know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I
will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
And they shall be my people, and
I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they
may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after
them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn
away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts,
that they may not turn from me. Jer. 32:38-40
What we see coming out of the
Classical Apologetics camp recently are men who are wholly enamored with Greek
Philosophy. They are obsessed with the ability of human reason. They are, for
the most part, wholly given over to Enlightenment philosophies to one degree or
another. If I am wrong, can you please explain to me why Spencer Toy, in his
open question to Calvinists/Presuppositionalists, never once turned to an
argument from exegesis? What text of Scripture did Spencer reference in order to support
his case? He didn’t appeal to Scripture at all. He appealed to human reason. He
made what he thinks is a sound case against presuppositionalism using the criterion of autonomous human reason as his standard. The
problem is that Spencer, like the unbeliever, uses autonomous human reason as
his standard for what justifies belief. The presuppositionalist is going to go
to Scripture every time.
It is always a bad idea for
finite human beings to focus on what God’s plan for permitting x might
be, that is, above and beyond the revealed truth that it is for His glory. We
know that God efficacious permits men to reject Christ, passing over them, and
he does so for his own glory. And when we are tempted to push that conversation
too far, we must put our hands to our mouth and remember the words of Paul:
“But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its
molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Rom. 9:20
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