Honestly I don't think it's a good theology. That doesn't mean that I won't be friends with a Calvinist. But I hold fast that is wrong.
If your wondering where I'm at in my theology, this is a pretty good video/channel, to get a pretty good idea of where I'm currently at. With that being said, that does not mean that I agree with everything on the channel. I'm only speaking in general terms here.
I believe that God is a God of love for all people. I believe that God is a just and loving God. For these reasons I could never accept John Calvin's teachings and the teachings of the Calvinist Churches.
A central doctrine of the Calvinists that I could never agree with is that the only reason some are in heaven and some are in hell is because it pleased God for them to be there. Notwithstanding the weak and misleading arguments to the contrary by many Calvinists, I maintain all consistent Calvinists inevitably believe in double predestination. They either believe God actively predestined some to hell, as Calvin does, or he did so by choosing not to offer what would have surely delivered them from hell to heaven, which is unconditional election and selective regeneration. Calvin refers to this cold, inescapable reality as the product of God’s wish, pleasure, and counsel. This concept doesn't fit well with the Biblical teaching that, "
God desires that all sinners be saved ( 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Ezekiel 18:23; Matthew 23:37 ).
Commenting on what Paul says in Romans 9, John
Calvin candidly explains, “Paul concludes that God has mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth (Rom 9:18). You see how he refers both to the mere pleasure of God. Therefore, if we cannot assign any reason for his bestowing mercy on his people, but just that it so pleases him, neither can we have any reason for his reprobating others but his will“. Calvin further says the reprobate are doomed in God’s “hidden purpose” while simultaneously, and quite contradictorily, maintaining “so wonderful is his love towards mankind that he would have them all to be saved.”
Calvin classifies God’s good pleasure to doom this innumerable group of people, whom he created, to such a ghastly and unalterable fate, which he did not have to choose, as “incomprehensible judgment.”
Similarly, the Canons of Dort, from the Calvinist Reformed Sect, assert, “Moreover, Holy Scripture . . . further bears witness that
not all people have been chosen but that some have not been chosen or have been passed by in God’s eternal election—those, that is, concerning whom God, on the basis of his entirely free, most just, irreproachable, and unchangeable good pleasure, made the following decision: to leave them in the common misery into which, by their own fault, they have plunged themselves; not to grant them saving faith and the grace of conversion, but finally to condemn and eternally punish them”[6] (italics added).
Fast forward to eternity. Imagine all the redeemed, unconditionally elected according to Calvinism, are standing on the precipice of hell in which untold billions of people suffer unimaginable, unquenchable, and unparalleled agony and torment. While the elect gaze into the cauldron of hell, one of the unconditionally elect exclaims
God is holy. And that proclamation is immediately and worshipfully met by thunderous amens and hallelujahs since, whether redeemed or judged, God’s perfect and unlimited righteousness and holiness are irrefutably evident to all.
Then another of the unconditionally elect, caught up in the moment, resoundingly declares that
God is love. An eerie pause follows this declaration. A hollow cavern of silence. A silence not from or awakening calmness, but a silence invoked by an
insurmountable contradiction. A silence wherein an attribute of God is suppressed by the conquest of evidence; a silence like never before. It is not one of awe and glorious wonder but one of confusion and demoralization of the elect.
While God clearly dealt with the elect and the damned in holiness, and the elect in love,
it is impossible to truthfully say God dealt with the damned, the reprobate, in perfect love, salvific love. Seeking to explain how God is perfect love and yet withholds his salvific love from those he created and predetermined for eternal torment is like trying to explain God as perfect holiness if he did not deal with all people and sin in perfect holiness.
Moreover, seeking to dismiss this contradiction of God’s perfect love by appealing to such as how God’s withholding his power at times does not equal that he is not omnipotent is fallacious. The reason this argument is fallacious is because love is a moral attribute like holiness and power is not. Consequently, he may display or withhold exercising his omnipotence based on his moral attributes, but God's moral nature of perfect holiness, righteousness, and love is always perfectly present. Calvinism calls this type of inescapable dilemma a “mystery.” Anywhere else,
it is called what it is, a tragic contradiction in Calvinism, that depicts God unlike the God of Scripture.
The reason that I could never accept Calvin's or the Calvinist doctrines is because the primary doctrine of predestination damns many souls to hell/torment for all eternity, for God's pleasure. That's not the God I believe in.
1
