So I'm going to be talking in my sessions in the morning about this topic here called A Faith Worth Saving. And what does that mean? A faith worth saving? We're going to be talking primarily about the historic faith, historic Christianity versus Calvinism. And I thought as an opening verse, as an opening idea, I would share from Jude verses 3 and 4, where I think a lot of you know this passage.
It's a great passage where Jude writes, " Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain men have crept in unnoticed who long ago were marked out for this condemnation. Ungodly men who turn the grace of our God into license for immorality and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.
So I love this phrase that is written there in that first sentence. The faith that was once for all delivered for the saints. And what we're going to try to be contending for here is exactly that. And unfortunately, there are many forces, many people, many heresies, many movements over the years that have tried to derail Christianity. And we're going to talk quite a bit about that in our sessions here. So in terms of structure, how am I going to do this? So I have 10 sessions with you all, two per day.
I'm going to be in the mornings from 8:30 to 10:00. And it's going to be two talks between 30 minutes to 60 minutes with a 10-minute break in the middle. And we're going to be doing a lot of just getting into the text, doing biblical exegesis here. And I'm going to give you a lot of references and additional readings and books that you can read after our week is finished. And what I wanted to do as well as we start is give you some tips for how to be successful here in Bible school.
So the first thing is do get plenty of sleep. It's great that we're all here and we want to get to know each other. But it's difficult when you're sleepy and other people are sleepy. And as we all know, sleep is contagious and yawning is contagious. And so try to get lots of sleep so that you're fresh for our sessions here. And don't neglect your daily time with God. You know It's kind of ironic sometimes when people go to a Bible school. What falls away is their time in the Bible, reading, praying, et cetera.
So let's not do that. Let's try to budget our schedules appropriately. Do take good notes. I'm an avid note-taker myself, and I talk a lot about this at Sattler about how to take good notes and tools to do that. Good notes are extremely important, and I hope that you can all be active learners here. And do read the quotes on the screen with me. I have a fairly heavy textual bent to my sessions, because there's a lot of content here. So read it with me. And then do your homework.
I'm actually going to be giving homework assignments. It should take between 30 minutes to 60 minutes a day. And you'll get a lot more out of my sessions if you do that. And a lot of it is going to be reading the Bible, but some of it is going to be reading the perspectives of Calvinists as well, because I want us to know how they represent themselves. And then do see this as a launch pad for future study after this week. OK, so let's jump right in here and let's first start by trying to define Calvinism.
What is Calvinism? It is a broad system, and it's difficult to define it in a short manner, but Calvinism is a broad system of thought that includes a commitment to Scripture, a distinctive view of preaching, and a system of soteriology. What does the word soteriology mean? Anybody? View of salvation, right? It comes from the Greek word soteria, and that means salvation. So soteriology is the study of salvation. How do we humans become saved? And I want to start off with a little bit of history.
I think history is very useful to understand what Calvinism is, how it was defined, and where we are today. So of course, for our purposes today, we're going to start with Calvin. We're going to have a later session on how Calvinism in some ways began many centuries before with Augustine. But for our purposes today, we're going to start with John Calvin. So as you can see, he was born in 1509, and he died in 1564.
So does anybody know what year of the Reformation when Martin Luther nailed his famous theses onto the door of the Wittenberg Chapel? Does anybody know what year that was? Even in the back? 1517. 1517. Excellent. Timothy Miller, a great job there. So 1517. And so you can see that John Calvin would have only been eight years old when that happened. So he's not as old as Luther. Luther, in a lot of ways, was the one who kicked off the Reformation. Calvin was very young at the time, but would soon follow on his heels.
He's a brilliant scholar. He's a brilliant writer. No matter what, I've read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Calvin. And he is a formidable intellect. There's no doubt about that. As you can see, he also died fairly young. He's French. His name is Jean Cauvin, but we anglicized that to be John Calvin. And he was in France, and France was a place where there was a lot of upheaval about all of the ideas that Luther was teaching. And it's kind of a long story, but he ends up fleeing France to go to Geneva.
And so Geneva, which is if you look on a map, Switzerland is kind of right to the east of France, and Geneva is right on the border there between France and Switzerland. And so he goes to Geneva and he is quickly recognized for his abilities to preach and teach. He was exiled for a short time there, but he spent most of his time in Geneva there and was a prolific, absolutely prolific writer and speaker. He devoted himself very intently to preaching. He would preach every single day, every other week.
So this was a person who took his work as a pastor and theologian very seriously. And after Calvin passed away, he handed over. I know he looks almost the same as the other picture, but this is actually a different person. I guess that was a popular look. So this is Theodore Beza. And Beza was the successor to Calvin. So Beza is B-E-Z-A. And so Beza was the successor to Calvin in Geneva, and he further codified the system and in some ways hardened the system. So Beza, he was born in 1519 and he died in 1605.
So a little bit younger than Calvin, but not that much younger. So as it turns out, Beza had a star student. He was a brilliant man who was there in Geneva. And it was this person here, Jacob Arminius. Arminius is Dutch, but he came to Switzerland, came to Geneva to study at this academy that Calvin had founded in Geneva. So a big part of why the Reformation was successful was they established these schools and colleges all throughout areas that were sympathetic to the Reformation.
And Jacob Arminius goes there and becomes Beza's Star student. And as you can see here, he was born in 1559, so quite a bit younger here than Calvin was. And Arminius initially loved Calvinism, believed it, was a strong believer in it. Eventually he goes back to Holland, or the Netherlands, and starts preaching through the Book of Romans.
And as he's preaching through the Book of Romans, we don't have a lot of information about exactly what happened, but Arminius changes his view on Calvinism and begins to propose some modifications, and begins eventually to propose a very different system to Calvinism. Well, he died in 1609, and there were a few people that admired Arminius greatly. And as this controversy was brewing, so you had the traditional Calvinists on the one side, and you had Arminius on the other side.
The governing authorities said, we need to convene a council to figure out who's right in all this. So that's the way they did things back then. You have a controversy, and you get all the leaders together, and you convene a council. And so what they asked the Arminian side to do, and Arminius, in fact, had just passed away, but they asked his followers to draft a set of articles, and it's often called the Remonstrance. So who knows what the word remonstrance means?
It's kind of an obscure word that we don't use much today. What does that word mean? Remonstrance? Do we know? So it means protest. So the Arminians were to write out their issues, their contentions with Calvinism. And so they wrote out these five articles of protest, the five articles of remonstrance, and then they submitted that and there was a synod that was held in the city of Dort. Where's Dort? And what's the longer name for Dort?
We should all know Dort, because it's actually important as well in the history of anabaptism. Dordrecht. So it's the same city. Dort is just a shorter name for Dordrecht. So a lot of you have heard of the Dordrecht confession, which is another important later confession that Anabaptists came up with. So in Dort, what they did was they said, OK, we're going to put all of your articles up for discussion here. And they had all of the Arminians sit in the middle here. There were 14 of them.
And then the observers were sitting on the outside. It'd be pretty grueling, I would think, to be sitting in the middle there. There's a lot of conflicting data on exactly how they structured this, but most people think that the deck was stacked against the Arminians. And this particular synod was held in 1619. And they decided, when all was said and done, that the Arminian position was heretical. And they decided to strip of office all of the pastors who held to the Arminian position. It was about 200 of them.
So they were all eliminated from their positions, and the Calvinists were securely in control. And in fact, the main kind of leader protector, Arminius, was now dead. His name was Oldenbarnevelt, was actually beheaded. So not a happy ending for the Arminians here. So Dort was this moment where the Arminians were decisively condemned. And they wrote, in response, the side on the favor of Calvinism, wrote their own five articles that were in opposition to the Arminians. So this is a really important number.
This number five here. So the Arminians had five articles of protest. And the folks in Dort said, " Okay, we're going to give you what we think are the actual five biblical truths here. " And it's beautifully captured in a famous acronym. What kind of flower is this? Tulip. It's a tulip. So it works really well because this all happened, this controversy happened in Holland or the Netherlands, which is famous for its tulips.
And so as it turns out, this was not done at Dort, but when they moved this over into English, as it turns out, all five of the points that the Calvinist side advanced, they fit into this acronym, Tulip, T-U-L-I-P. We're going to go through that right now. And so it all works really nicely. It's easy to remember. Think of Holland, think of Dort, and you're going to understand it well.
I'm a big believer in defining Tulip and defining any position from the perspective of the best advocates and adherents of Calvinism. And so I'm going to give you a lot of quotes from Calvin and Calvinism here defining what tulip is. And we'll get a good feel for it over the course of our week here. So let's start with the T. The T stands for, you'll read different things. It's either total depravity or total inability. Usually people will say total depravity, but it's one of the two.
And a lot of people get the T totally wrong. And they'll say, we asked this question in an apologetics class we had a few months ago, and someone said, " Oh, total depravity, that means you're as bad as you can possibly be. " That's what a lot of people think total depravity means. But that's actually not right. And Calvinists famously say that even Hitler loved his mother. So they're not trying to say that you're like as bad as you can possibly be, that you're like doing the maximum amount of sin.
That's not the main idea. Instead, and I'm going to give you a quote from Calvin himself, he says that the whole of every man is overwhelmed as by a deluge from head to foot so that no part is immune from sin, and all that proceeds from him is to be imputed to sin. So basically, the idea of total depravity is that every part of your faculties, your mind, your emotions, is somehow affected by sin. It's somehow corrupted by sin.
And the way you normally hear this expressed is that people will say, Calvinists love to say that you're dead, you're spiritually dead. That when you are born, when you are pre-Christian, in that whole phase, it's like you're just a corpse. And that even if someone preaches the gospel to you, you can't hear it. So this is the basic idea. And that's why sometimes it's called total inability, because you're unable to respond to God. You're unable to confess your need for God. You're unable to desire the gospel even.
So that's the T. Let's go to the U. U is unconditional election. So the U is, in many ways, the worst of all the five. I will tell you right now, I don't believe any of the five. I think all five of them are wrong. The T is the least objectionable, and I think in some ways you can modify the T to have something that is more biblical. The one that is by far the most egregious and is the fountainhead for all five is the you, unconditional election.
And I'm going to read a quote here from Calvin himself who defines it by saying, " God, once established by His eternal and unchangeable plans, those whom He long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, he would devote to destruction. Again, he writes, " Therefore, those whom God passes over, he condemns, and this he does for no other reason than he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines for his own children.
" Okay, so Calvin held what's called double predestination. You can picture the mass of humanity, and he's saying, God is saying in the secret counsels of his own will, you, you, you, you, you are going to be saved. You, you, you, you are going to be damned or reprobate. And this is purely out of God's good pleasure, out of God's own counsel. It's nothing meritorious in us at all. There's a famous Calvinist who passed away a few years ago, R.C.
Sproul, who I'm just giving you this from another perspective because I think it's really good to hear this from different authors. He says, " Calvinism teaches that from all eternity God has chosen to intervene in the lives of some people and bring them to saving faith and has chosen not to do that for other people. From all eternity without any prior view of our own human behavior, God has chosen some to election and others under reprobation.
The basis for God's choice does not rest in man, but solely in the good pleasure of the divine will. Okay, so that's the idea. It's that God for reasons unbeknownst to any of us just chooses some to be elected, chooses some to be damned, and it has nothing to do with anything in us. Including foreseen faith. So it's not like God is making these decisions based on how people will respond. So this is a big idea. This U is huge. So if you get the U, then most of the rest of the tulip begins to fall into place.
I want to show you one other slide here. I know there's a lot of quotes, but I really want to hammer in this you unconditional election idea. In Calvinism, God foreordains and Calvin likes this quote renders certain absolutely everything. Every detail, every particle, everything that happens in the universe is foreordained and rendered certain by God.
There's another Calvinist who's no longer alive, Loraine Boettner, who says, " God very obviously predetermined every event which would happen so that even the sinful acts of men are included in his plan. " So if God foreordains and renders certain everything, that includes sin as well. And we'll talk about how they deal with that because you think like, " Whoa, that seems like not a great position to be putting God in.
" And again, Boettner goes on to write, " There is nothing causal nor contingent in this world because the world as a whole and all its parts and movements and changes was brought into a unity by the governing, all pervading, all harmonizing activity of the divine will. And its purpose was to manifest the divine glory. " So this is huge for Calvinists. And in fact, I'll see if anybody knows this. There's one key word that Calvinists love to use that describes this whole concept.
Does anybody know what that one word is? Predestination. So it's close to predestination, but there's a bigger word because predestination is just about our salvation. There's a word that's even bigger than that that encompasses salvation and everything else, yeah? Divine will. Divine will? OK, that's close. So the word is sovereignty. So they love this word sovereignty.
So it's pretty hard to have a conversation with a Calvinist and go more than five minutes without saying, they'll ask you, do you believe in the sovereignty of God? And you should always ask, what do you mean by that? How do you define sovereign? Because in some sense, we would all say God is sovereign, right? We would all say that God is ruling the universe. But what is meant by that? Other people who are not usually Calvinists call it divine determinism.
So that means that God has determined every last, again, event, every last detail of the universe from before it began. So this is, like I said, the fountainhead of all of the tulip, all of the petals, if you will, of tulip. Limited Atonement. The Doctrine of Limited Atonement, the L in Tulip, teaches that Christ effectively redeems from every people only those who were chosen from eternity to salvation. Particular redemption this is by an author named Kevin DeYoung, who's a Calvinist.
Particular redemption is often considered a more favorable term because the point of the doctrine is not to limit the mercy of God, but to make it clear that Jesus did not die in the place of every sinner on the earth, but for His particular people. So the idea is that Jesus died just for the elect, just for the saved. So I was, last week, in fact, I'm almost done with a graduate course in Calvin.
And this course is being taught by one of the top ten, maybe top three, Calvinists, who's a church historian at a world-class Calvinist institution. And about 10 of us were doing a classroom session. And one of the men on the call raised his hand and said, can we say that God loves everybody? And they were really debating this and going back and forth.
And it's a big problem in Calvinism because, as I said, when he creates humanity, he's saying that a certain number of them are not going to be elect and that they're actively, in a sense, reprobate. They're actively passed over, according to classical Calvinism. So they hemmed and hawed about that for a little bit. And the professor said, well, there is a sense in which God loves even the non-elect in the sense that they receive common grace while they're on this earth.
So a non-Christian still gets sunlight and food and things like that, even though they're damned afterward. And he says, " But I will not say and I will not ever preach to a mixed crowd that Jesus died for you. " And I thought, " Wow, that's a pretty stark statement to make. " But he was very committed to limited atonement. And he said that if I go out to a mixed crowd and I say, " Jesus died for you, " that's not biblical in his mind. So it's a very different perspective.
And when you first hear Limited Atonement, it sounds bizarre. It's been called a doctrine looking for a text because there's very little scriptural support. In fact, all the scriptural verses that seem to talk about this say the exact opposite. But if you believe in the you and if you believe in a sense that there is this predetermined number of the elect that God has purpose to save, limited atonement starts to make a little bit more sense.
I will say as well that the L is the one doctrine of the five that some Calvinists will reject. So this is the one. It's such a bitter pill to swallow that a lot of Calvinists, Bruce Ware is a famous one, will say, you know what? We're going to hold to the other four, but not to this one. So we'll talk more about that in the later session. OK, I, irresistible grace. So irresistible grace is very closely related to unconditional election.
So the two vowels in there, the U and the I, these are the ones that I think are the worst of the whole system. And so I'll make a statement here. The vowels should hit your vowels. They should just like, ugh, what is this? So irresistible grace is very simple to define. So R.C. Sproul, a well-known Calvinist, says, " God unilaterally and monergistically does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. " It's misspelled for there. So he unilaterally and monergistically does what we cannot do for ourselves.
So tell me, what does the word monergistically mean? Can anybody take a stab at that? So mono, we know. What is mono? One. Yeah, you lifted up your finger there, Derek. Good. What does the ergistically mean or ergon mean? Anybody know that word? So if you think about ergonomics, it's like how you stand when you're at work. So ergo comes from the Greek word for work. So it basically means that there's one worker in the process of salvation, which is God. That humans have no role in this.
The opposite of monergism is synergism, where God and humans are cooperating in some way. So a big feature of Calvinism is that there's only one actor at justification at that initial moment of salvation, which is God. And a lot of Calvinists then realize that that sounds sort of odd, and they struggle with that. And biblically, how do you think about that? So many Calvinists are very quick to also say, but it's not against your will.
It's not like God is somehow dragging you, kicking and screaming into the Kingdom of God. It's like He changes your will. So you don't feel like this sense of external compulsion. It's a difficult position to be in when you're trying to justify this. Again, Boettner says the elect are so influenced by divine power that their coming is an act of voluntary choice. So God is really the one who's doing it, and it's irresistible. You're not able to overcome that in some way. God will overcome your sin.
But it feels like it's a voluntary choice. And so whether this is paradox or sheer contradiction, we'll talk about later, but Calvinists are very quick to say this. There's another very deep point underneath all of this, which is a big deal in Calvinism, which is that the consequence of this is that regeneration precedes conversion and faith. So that somehow God goes to you, and you get this irresistible grace, and the lights go on, and all of a sudden, you then express faith.
So regeneration is when you are quickened, you're made alive, and then afterwards, faith is expressed. So do you see why you have to have, in a sense, regeneration come before faith? Do y'all see that? This is a very important idea, because if you believe, for example, in the T, remember the T was our total depravity, total inability, you can't respond to God. You're dead. And so you need God to raise you up.
And they often say it's like Jesus speaking to Lazarus, that you're just dead in the tomb, and you can't respond at all. So Jesus has to speak to you, God has to speak to you, to wake you up, that's regeneration. And then, after you're regenerated, then conversion and faith follow. All right, the last letter of Calvinism is P, which is Perseverance of the Saints. Now, in fairness to Calvinists, and this is something that they, I think, rightly protest against, is let's not call this once saved, always saved.
You know, a lot of people summarize this and they say, " Oh, it's once saved, always saved. " And they bristle against that because in fairness to their system, that's not really what it's about. Calvinists don't at least authentic Calvinists don't teach that you just pray some prayer and that you can live like a pagan the rest of your life. Calvin was very strong on insisting that those who are true believers, who are truly elected, do indeed persevere in holiness, and they strive in righteousness.
And so that once saved always saved is a little bit like fighting words to a Calvinist. They're like, hey, if you say that, you just don't get us. Just don't even talk to me because you don't understand our position well. So I grant that to them. And I think that's an accurate representation of what Calvinism is. So I try not to say once saved, always saved. If somebody actually believes that, that must be a really wicked, goopy pop version of some evangelicalism that's not Calvinism.
So the doctrine is super simple. It teaches that God preserves the faith of the elect until the end. And because God is preserving saints, then those saints persevere to the end. And so Perseverance expresses this idea that they're striving and there's ongoing battles and progressive sanctification until the very end. Okay, so that's Tulip. Matthew. Can you elaborate on what the difference is the distinction? Because when you explain perseverance of the saints, it sounds very much like Once Saved Always Saved.
Well, the difference between Once Saved, Always Saved, and Perseverance and Saints is a lot of people who talk about Once Saved, Always Saved, they'll say, " Oh, if you just pray this prayer, you're good now. " And no matter how you live the rest of your life, you're still saved. A Calvinist would say, no, that's not true, that somebody who's legitimately saved at the beginning will continue in sanctification and wrestling and progression and holiness.
And so they prefer the term perseverance because it connotes this kind of ongoing struggle to the very end. OK, so what we're going to do now is look at a few important Calvinists in history. So I mentioned Theodore Beza, who was the next leader in Geneva after Calvin. Some of you will know the name John Knox. He was a famous preacher in Scotland. George Whitefield. George Whitefield spent a lot of time here in Boston and Massachusetts. In fact, he preached a very famous sermon just two blocks from here.
He was one of the leaders of the so-called Great Awakening in the 1700s and had a massive, massive impact on defining American Christianity. One of his colleagues, a contemporary, his name was Jonathan Edwards. Also from Massachusetts, he lived in Northampton, which is a couple of hours away from us here. A very dedicated Calvinist who is adored by the modern Calvinists, which we'll talk about in a little bit. The whole Puritan tradition is Calvinist.
So the Puritans came to Boston in 1630, and the Puritans, they defined America. They really created America. And it's difficult to escape their influence for good or for bad. But the Puritans were very, very important, very influential. A lot of you know Charles Spurgeon, a famous preacher, a Baptist preacher in the 1800s. He was a Calvinist. And I mean, he gets quoted a lot by a lot of people. I've quoted him many times, but he was a very committed Calvinist.
So there's a lot of influences bearing down on us to promote Calvinism. What are some of the historically Calvinist denominations? So Presbyterian. So anytime you hear Presbyterian, whether it's Presbyterian Church of America, PCA, or Presbyterian Church USA, they all have, at their origin, a Calvinist theology. Similarly, the congregationalists have a Calvinist theology at their root, at their historic origin. And then now, what's becoming very popular are the so-called Reformed Baptists.
So people like John Piper and others fall into this camp here. Basically, all the denominations that have the name Reformed in them are Calvinists, nearly all of them. So pretty important people historically, several very large and important denominations. And now, we're in the midst of a resurgence of Calvinism, a tremendous resurgence.
So, what happened was, and if we have time in later sessions, we can go into this, but in the middle part of the 20th century, in the early and middle part, Calvinism was actually on the decline. There were a couple of authors, though, who started to write prolifically and advocate for the position. Loraine Boettner was one. And we'll talk about how it really took off. But eventually, in the ' 80s, the trend was broken and Calvinism started to grow. And now it's in a tremendous growth curve.
And a lot of the most popular preachers and speakers, I'm going to show you their pictures in a little bit are Calvinists. And just in 2006, not that long ago, they had a conference called Together for the Gospel where John Piper and others came together and they catalyzed this movement that's often called the New Calvinism. So this new Calvinism is particularly popular among young people. So when I say young people, college, graduate school, so 18 to late 20s. And it's also known as Young, Restless, and Reformed.
So there used to be a TV show called The Young and the Restless, and they kind of played on those words and called it young, restless, and reformed. So basically, there was a lot of young people that were just sick and tired of these drab churches that had this watery, very weak Christian teaching that were kind of this hybrid of pragmatic and entertainment. And they were looking for something more substantial.
It's very interesting that people of the younger generation wanted something more substantial, and the new Calvinists seized on that. And the New Calvinism is much more missional and strategic. And I'll show you a little bit more about that. I'm going to show you some pictures of Calvinists from the last 100 years who have been incredibly important. So here's one. So Loraine Boettner, he was a Calvinist when it was not popular to be a Calvinist.
He was born in 1901, he died in 1990, and he wrote a book called The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. And this is a great quote from him that expresses what we just talked about in our session where we defined Tulip, where he says, " A man is not saved because he believes in Christ. He believes in Christ because he is saved. " Do you get that? If you get this quote, you'll get a lot of what we just talked about there in Tulip. So he's saying that God is first saving people.
There's this moment of regeneration where the lights go on, and God monergistically, without anything that you do, regenerates you. And out of that new man, that new person that you are, then you believe in Christ. So this quote is a beautiful quote if you're a Calvinist that expresses the heart of his theology. So Boettner was just slogging away when it was not popular to be a Calvinist. And there were two people in particular who were very influenced by Boettner and others that took this and popularized it.
So Boettner was more of a theologian, a little bit stuffier, writing big books, not necessarily the most dynamic speaker. But who's this person here? Yeah, this is John Piper. So he's by far the person that took Calvinism and promoted it and made it this international growing movement. So John Piper, if you've not heard him speak, is a very talented, very gifted orator, and he's skilled in many ways.
And John Piper, and we'll talk a lot more about him in later sessions, has influenced thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And I'm often amazed that I'll go and travel in various Anabaptist churches, conservatives. And a lot of young people, one of their favorite speakers is John Piper. And he's all over YouTube. He's all over the internet. It's hard to get away from him.
And so there's a whole group of people that are often called the Piper Cubs that are kind of his disciples, so to speak, that have carried this message of Calvinism out. And Piper is unapologetically trying to repackage Jonathan Edwards in terms and language that appeal to a broader audience, particularly young people. So he's by far the dominant force, but the number two is probably this person here. Does anybody know who this is? John MacArthur, very good. So this is John MacArthur.
So I've actually been to his church and heard him speak in person. He's in Southern California. He's got a large church there. And he has a radio program called " Grace to You. " Again, very talented speaker. And he has been on the radio, writing books, writing commentaries. There's a John MacArthur study Bible and getting his materials out there. And with John MacArthur in the Minneapolis area and John MacArthur in the Los Angeles area, the two of them just dominated the airwaves.
I worked in Christian radio for three years when I was in college, and you couldn't go for very long on the radio without hearing one of those two speakers. R.C. Sproul is this individual here, I don't know how many of you know him. He passed away a few years ago. He's the founder of a group called Ligonier Ministries. He wrote a lot of books, very prolific as well. Anybody know who this is? Yeah, very good. Mark Dever.
So Mark Dever is a pastor of a church in Washington, D.C., and he's the founder of a group called Nine Marks. And they promote basically solid church structures. And a lot of what he says, I would agree with, but he's a very committed Calvinist and a lot of Calvinism comes through in his preaching. Who is this person? He is in New York. So this is Tim Keller. Tim Keller is a pastor of a huge church in Manhattan. Again, another incredibly gifted speaker who was another Calvinist.
And Tim Keller was a person who started talking about the importance of Christians going into the cities before it was popular. And he is the person who and the Calvinists have followed his lead there who's really promoted the idea that if you want to change the world, go to the cities. And he went to Manhattan. And if you go to a place like Harvard here and go to the Christian Fellowship, he's probably the best known, followed person there. Maybe Piper would be ahead of him.
But Tim Keller is an absolute hero in those circles there. Getting a little bit harder with these other ones. Do you know this person here? This is Al Mohler. So he's the president of a seminary in Louisville, Kentucky called Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And he has made Louisville, Kentucky in that seminary, to be one of the epicenters, if not the epicenter, for training Calvinists to go out. And he's, again, another very talented speaker and writer. I'm guessing nobody's going to know this person here.
This is Wayne Grudem. So he wrote a systematic theology, which is the most popular systematic theology. This one here, anybody know him? This is J.I. Packer. So J. I. Packer is not quite as popular as he was when I was younger, but he wrote a book called Knowing God that was a very, very popular book, and he's also a very strong Calvinist. Anyone know this person here? What's that? I've got him coming up, so you're close. This is D.A. Carson. Did someone say DA Carson? Okay, this is D.A. Carson. You got it? Nice.
So this is D.A. Carson, prolific commentator. This is Kevin DeYoung, who is one of the leaders of this YRR, Young Restless and Reformed. And then this is Michael Horton. He has a radio program on called The White Horse Inn. That was on, I remember very well. I started college in 1991, and he was on the airwaves end. He's still going. And almost every program is about why Calvinism is right and everybody else is wrong. Who's this person? You should know him. This is David Platt.
So David Platt is, again, another very talented speaker here who has written a book called Radical. A lot of you have heard that book or know that book. And he's not quite as committed, or at least overt. He's committed to Calvinism, but he's not quite as overt as, say, Michael Horton and Piper and some of those others. But he's definitely a Calvinist, and that comes through in his preaching. And then I think this is the last one I have. Anybody know this person here? This is a harder one.
I just heard him speak not too long ago. J.D. Greer. He's the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So the Southern Baptists are the largest denomination in America. And J.D. Greer is, you can tell, a fairly young man who's now president and he's, again, a committed Calvinist there. So lots of very impressive speakers that are writing books on the radio, challenging, especially young people, to live a more devout Christian life. There is a flagship Bible that Calvinists love, which here it is.
This is the ESV Study Bible. So I'm sure a lot of you have seen this. The study notes here are heavily biased towards Calvinism. The ESV translation in general is a translation that's geared towards Calvinism. So think about it. These study Bibles can have a pretty profound influence on your theology. And a lot of people don't even realize when they pick up the ESV Study Bible that this is their book.
And then I mentioned this before, but this is kind of the standard systematic theology that the Evangelical Camp uses. It's called Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem. So in addition to that, there's a lot of seminaries. So I mentioned SBTS, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Al Mohler is. Westminster Theological Seminary is in Philadelphia. Very prominent seminary that's trained many Calvinists. These other ones are shown here. And plenty more.
I'm not going to read this list, but you can see there's lots of places here. And I didn't even put on, except for SBTS, the Reformed Baptist seminaries on there. There's dozens and dozens of these seminaries, and they're full. So they are just cranking out thousands and thousands of Calvinist ministers that go out and, again, write books, preach sermons, go into cities, evangelize, you name it. So it's pretty daunting the amount of influence that is coming in from these streams. So why is it growing?
I mentioned that Calvinism is now enjoying a resurgence. Well, I think it's pretty obvious, the first point, the influence of a few talented, eloquent speakers and writers. The reality is, no matter how much we want to pretend differently, people who are charismatic, influential speakers, they just draw crowds. And people like John Piper, John MacArthur, David Platt, all these people, they just draw crowds. And that is one of the major sources, in fact, probably the primary source of their initial growth.
And they published thousands and thousands of books and study Bibles. I mean, anything by Crossway, there's a publisher called Crossway that makes the ESV. It's probably produced by a Calvinist. They dominate the seminaries. They focus on cities. So I mentioned this has been Tim Keller's message. They understood long ago that if you want to win the world with your message, go to the cities and teach it there. They've been very effective. They multiply adherents and the movement grows.
And the more adherents you get, the more they teach, well, the more it kind of snowballs, right? It grows and grows and grows and grows. In contrast, in other settings, often the preaching is poor. One of the main reasons why people listen there is because they're just great speakers. And so often I'll hear people say like, " Oh, the preaching in my congregation is just so weak. " And there's little substance in those churches. It's more just a watery, goopy Christianity. And people know this.
People know that God has become a self-esteem coach in a lot of churches. And they know in their heart of hearts, that's not right. And they turn to Calvinism as another option where they say, " You know what? I'm tired of this humanistic nonsense. I want something more solid. " And so they swing all the way over to this notion of the God of Calvinism. OK, so even though I'm going to spend almost all my time trying to tear down Calvinism, I'm actually going to say there's a few things I appreciate about them.
So I think it's important to be balanced in this. So first, they're not casual with their faith. These are highly intentional people. They are very committed. They are very diligent. These are people who have truly, truly devoted their lives to the cause. They spend a lot of time studying and practicing effective communication. This is something that I think we all need to improve on here is learning how to be effective communicators.
They recognize that if you can't communicate well, you can't win people with their message. They're organized. And they're somewhat historically minded. Now they go back 500 years and they kind of celebrate the 1500s. Our message is much better. We go back 2,000 years. We should be way more historically minded than they are. But what's happened is that, again, a lot of people are just tired of this very modern pragmatic Christianity.
And they go to the Calvinists, and the Calvinists are talking about these creeds from the 1500s, and Heidelberg, and the Belgic Confession, and the Westminster Confession. And there's this sense that all of us have, hopefully you have it, that you should feel like you want to be part of something that's not just something that started yesterday. Something that has this weight, this gravitas of something more historically minded.
And I appreciate that, that the Calvinists, even though they don't go far enough, they have that. And they're prolific. They're incredibly prolific. And they know who they are. They have defined their lines well. They know who's in their tribe, so to speak, and they know who's not. Okay. Why they are wrong? I'm going to spend a lot of time on this slide because they're wrong in so many ways that it's absolutely tragic. So the first is they defame God's glory. This for me is a big deal here.
So no matter how you slice it, and we're going to spend time talking about this, but any notion of a God who creates humanity, all of the billions and billions of people that have been created. And God says to a substantial chunk, the majority of those people, that in his eternal decree, that he is going to condemn them and foreordain them to be damned without any hope of salvation. And even their sins, even their own corrupted nature was ordained by God, was created by God.
That is just a really sick picture of God. It's a very twisted picture of God. And there's lots of analogies that people have made. Imagine someone who raises puppies, and they raise puppies, and at the end of that, say they raise 100 puppies, and they take 10 of them at the end, and they love them, and they care for them, but they take 90 of them and torture them as long as they live. You'd say, like, what kind of a sick person are you that would do this?
And those types of analogies, they're not meant to be flippant. I actually think that they're pretty good analogs for the God of Calvinism. A man named Roger Olson, who has said that in Calvinism, God is worse than the devil. The reason he says that is that if you think about it, the devil doesn't create anybody. The devil is trying to draw people into eternal destruction. In Calvinism, God creates people, and also foreordains, they're going to hell.
I mean, if this is the God of the Bible, it's like, wow, what is this? I mean, this is a horrible, horrible doctrine of God. It's hard for me to imagine something that is as wicked as this, that you can't just outright call blasphemy. I mean, I personally believe it is blasphemy to believe that this is the God of the Bible. They demean God's grace. So grace is one of these words that Calvinists love. They say that are the five points of Calvinism. They sometimes call it the doctrines of grace.
Well, one of the first questions that I like to ask my Calvinist friends is, who gets this grace? Who gets it exactly? And they'll kind of sheepishly admit to you that this grace that God gives, this salvific grace, not the common grace. So there's common grace, which is the sun and the rain and the food and all that. But salvific grace only goes to a small number of people. Because Jesus said, and Calvinists agree, that most people are lost. Broad is the way that leads to destruction.
Narrow is the way that leads to life. Only a few good on it. So we know from that passage that most people are lost, few are saved. And so in the Calvinist scheme, God only gives His grace to a small number of people. In our scheme, God gives grace to all of humanity. And we're going to look at passages about this. So right off the bat, I think, your notion of God's grace, I find repugnant. That God is creating people but not giving them any salvific grace. They spoil God's gospel.
So if you think about it, you know the gospel, what does the word gospel mean? It's easy. Good news, right? So imagine going around and preaching, " Hey, guess what everybody? God created all of you. Most of you can't even respond to the message of the gospel. Most of you have been foreordained before the creation of the world to be eternally damned. That's great news. And you would be thinking like, that sounds like horrible news to me. That sounds miserable. The gospel is supposed to be good news for everybody.
Now, you don't have to accept it, but it should be good news for everybody. So the whole essence of the gospel being good news is lost in Calvinism. Of course, it's good news if you're among the elect, but if you're not, it's horrible news. They don't hold to the hard commands of the New Testament. You might think, well, how is this related? Jesus was very wise in Matthew 7, where He says to look at the fruit of teachers when you examine the authenticity of their teachings.
And I've known hundreds and hundreds of Calvinists over the years, and I've never met one, not one, who embraces and joyfully practices the hard commands of the New Testament. Things like non-resistance, our teachings on divorce and remarriage, our teachings on separation from the world. They find ways to get out of those or to minimize those or to say, yeah, maybe this, maybe that.
And I think, wow, you spent all this time on these philosophical speculations about God, but the actual day-to-day hard commands of the New Testament, you don't hold to those. And that is a fatal flaw of Calvinism. They teach what is historically novel. Now, a lot of young people say, " Oh, well, this is great. We're going back 500 years and we're celebrating the Reformation. " Well, we're going to go through this later on.
But much of what Calvin taught is either from Augustine, who is fourth century, or some of it he just made up and is brand new. So I'll give you an example. That doctrine, the perseverance of the saints, the doctrine that once you are among the elect, you can't fall away. Augustine never taught that. Augustine actually taught that you could fall away. Luther, who was Calvin's compatriot, read all those passages and said, " You know what? It's pretty clear from Scripture, you can fall away.
" So even people that were very close to him, Augustine and Luther, rejected Perseverance of the Saints. And so we have something that's a more novel historic position. And Calvinists, and I'll show you some quotes from Calvinist, begrudgingly admit that among the first part of the history of the church, they don't find support. And in fact, they find the exact opposite. Their systems are philosophically consistent but biblically deviant.
We'll spend quite a bit of time looking at this and doing exegesis of Scripture, but they've created a beautiful system. There's no doubt. Once you buy into that you, the unconditional election, you get this whole system that works. It fits. But when you start comparing that system with various teachings of Scripture, it does not work. It doesn't fit. And what we end up having to do, what they end up having to do, is to say, you know what? That passage in the Bible that seems like it says plainly, it teaches X.
So like all the passages, for example, where it seems to say that God wants all people to be saved, there are several passages, 2 Peter, 1 Timothy. They say, " Actually no, no, no, no, it doesn't mean that. God doesn't really want all people to be saved. " And we'll look at these in a later session. And you just think like, wow, you are sticking to your system, even though it means running roughshod over Scripture. To make the system work, they redefine terms.
I'll give you one example of this, and we'll spend more time on this later. So the word responsibility, we all know this word, right? Responsibility, it means able to respond. Very simple. Able to respond. So I have a three-month-old at home, and my oldest is 12 years old. So if I go to my house and I say, " Okay, my 12-year-old's name is Luke. " And I say, " Hey, Luke, go clean your room. " Well, I'm going to hold him responsible for that because he is able to respond to that. He can hear me. He's a healthy boy.
He can go clean his room. But if I go to my three-month-old and I say, go clean your room, well, it would be wrong of me to call my three-year-old responsible for that because they don't understand English yet. He can't walk, he can't clean, he can't do any of those things, right? The whole idea of total inability is that you are unable to respond. So Calvinism, on the one hand, will say, " You are responsible, but on the other hand, they'll say, but actually you're unable to respond.
" And you're like, " This is a total contradiction. It makes no sense. " And there are many examples of these kinds of redefinitions of terms. They cling to proof text. So we're going to see this, and we're going to go through each of these. Romans 9 through 11, Ephesians 1, there's a couple of passages in John. There's about half a dozen or so passages that are their favorite texts.
And no matter what the rest of the Bible says, no matter what other passages might read, they cling to those proof texts, and I think read them badly out of context. This is related, they often grossly violate the meanings of the simplest text. And then their understanding of salvation is fundamentally defective. We'll talk more about this. And this one is one that I want you to experience. We're going to read a piece later on in the week about this. They rarely engage in honest discussion with the other side.
There are a few who do. So I'm not trying to say everyone. But we're going to read a piece by John Piper where he just totally misrepresents the other side and sets up terrible, terrible straw men that I look at this and I think, " You're an intelligent person. I know you're an intelligent person. Why do you so badly misrepresent the other side? " So there are many, many, many reasons why Calvinists are wrong.
And as I said, I have no doubt in my mind that Calvinism is a terrible blasphemy that is designed to destroy God's glory, demean God's grace, spoil his gospel, and ultimately lead people off of the narrow path. Okay, next. This is a quote from A.W. Pink. He is a famous Calvinist. What kind of God is this? So this is a quote from Pink. He says, " When we say that God is sovereign in the exercise of His love, we mean that He loves whom He chooses. God does not love everybody.
" So this is the kind of thing that you hear Calvinists write, and as I said, I was just in a discussion a week ago with one of the top Calvinists in the world on this very topic. And there's another person named Dave Hunt who says, " What love is this? " You know, there's that hymn, " What love is this? " And he says, " What love is this? What love is this where God is creating beings but not giving them any opportunity for salvation? " It's a disturbing system.
And this is the standard edition of the Institutes for the Christian Religion here. This is Calvin's magnum opus, his masterpiece. I should have brought it in, but I was actually reading it this morning. And it's a two-volume set. It's about 1,500 pages in length. And he spends a tremendous amount of time in his book here trying to define the doctrine of God. And he goes on for hundreds of pages trying to define the essence of who God is. It's a very theologically minded book.
Do you know there's a really interesting index in the back? This index in the back shows you all the places where he quotes from Scripture. And so you can see like, oh, where did he quote from John 3:16? And it'll tell you what page it is and all that. Well, as it turns out, despite all of his work in defining God, you know what he never quotes in all of the Institutes for Christian religion? He never quotes a single time from 1 John 4:8 or 1 John 4:16. Some of you know that passage where it says, " God is love.
" Never quotes from that once in the whole of his two volumes here. It's kind of amazing that he would hit sovereignty and he would hit all these things about justice and holiness, but totally miss those passages. I've only got two slides left here, and then we're going to take a break. Thankfully, in the midst of this resurgence of Calvinism, there is now a movement that is trying to respond to Calvinism and take it down and get us back to something more biblical.
I'm going to share a quote here from a guy named Austin Fisher, who I appreciated his writings. He says, " But I believe we best say yes to God's glory and his sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism. " In fact, you can actually recover a more robust, more biblical vision of God's sovereignty in His glory by ultimately rejecting Calvinism. And I love this analogy he says here. He says, " In what sense was God just if He had done something like punishing people eternally for sins, He made certain they would commit?
How are those in hell merely getting what they deserve when God ordained that they commit their sins? How can humans be responsible for their sins when God is ultimately the cause of their sins? Can I come up with a single analogy or illustration that makes the slightest sense of this? " He was a very committed Calvinist, and he wrote a book documenting his exodus from Calvinism. And he ultimately was bothered the most by this very concept. And I like how he puts it here.
Love, justice, and goodness had been warped beyond recognition as they were sucked into the black hole of glory. And I'll put glory in quotes there because it's the Calvinist idea of glory, which is this divine determinism. There's another writer, Scott McKnight, who says, " Is the Calvinist God the God we discover when we look into the face of Jesus, the incarnate God? " I love that. When you read Jesus, when you study Jesus, when you behold His life, do you see anything like the God of Calvinism?
So my last slide for the session is, " Let's defend the honor of God. " We are here trying to mobilize all of you, every single one of you, every man and woman in this room, to promote the true honor of God. And I think this verse is very relevant here, Colossians 2:8, " See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit. " As we're going to see, Calvinism is this very elaborate philosophical construction that has taken many people captive, but we're going to be on guard.
And Calvinism is a man-made human philosophy designed to blaspheme God, violate the Scriptures, and send many into eternal death. I know that's strong language, but I believe that. And so, as we begin our exegesis of Scripture, in the next session, will you contend with us for the faith worth saving?