Yeah, let's go ahead and get started. So we're going to talk in our final session about just the significance of all that we've done in our previous nine sessions together. But as we open up, I want to hopefully a lot of you if not all of you got to read Calvin's Polemic Against the Anabaptist and Schleitheim. And hopefully you get to read Schleitheim as well. It's pretty short. The nice thing about the early Anabaptists is that they were much more concise than the Protestants.
So what were Calvin's arguments and how would you respond? Let's spend a few minutes on this. I know that as I warned you, his language is a bit cumbersome. And you probably have to look up a few words here and there, but hopefully you're able to get the gist of his arguments. Stan? Baptism is the replacement of circumcision. Big deal is the replacement of circumcision. Yeah, he refers to that a lot. Did you have anything more?
Well, he also talked about first of all, he said the definition of baptism was baptism for repentance or the renewing of life with promise and forgiveness of our sins. And he said circumcision is exactly the same as that. Right. So that's why it's Yep. Good. You had your hand up. This is something that the church always Yeah, so he claims that. And so that's interesting because, in fact, if you go to Augustine, who is his hero, and I told you that before, that certainly you would find that there.
But if you go back earlier into the Ante-Nicene period, there's a great book on this that if anyone interested, it's by Everett Ferguson on the history of baptism in the first 300 years. And it emerges in the late second, early third century. And basically what had happened was, Tertullian actually writes about this is people did have a very high view of baptism, and they held it as kind of the last step in coming into the church. So repent, believe, be baptized. They held all three together.
And because Peter says things like in Acts 2:38, " Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins. " And I asked De Paul, " What are we waiting for arise and be baptized washing away your sins? " Peter says, " For baptism, doth now save us. " And so it's pictured as being salvific in this complex along with repent and belief. And so what happened was children were getting sick and everyone was worried about, " Okay, they're going to die. " And so we need to baptize them before they die, just in case.
And so what happens is, as Sterling comments, is the age starts to go lower and lower and lower because, again, in the beginning it was just the adults, but they were so fearful. And there was just a little bit of this like, I want so badly for them to make into the next into eternal life. And then eventually, by the time you get to the fourth century, you have all out infant baptism there. So it's a bit of a specious argument that he makes, but he makes it nonetheless. Other arguments that he made? Yeah, please.
Another one I noticed is that he claims that salvation is passed down from their children. Yeah, he does make that argument. I'm glad you caught that. So he tries to and he conflates this again, but he talks about Abraham and how kind of Abraham is part of this covenant family and goes down. And do you notice again this confusion of election to service with the condition of salvation, right? It's a big, big theme, hopefully, that everyone's catching of our week here.
I'll mention one other argument that he makes, unless somebody else has another one. Yeah, Stan, it's great. He said that if you always got baptized when you got more light or whatever, then you should have a later pond. Exactly. Yeah, that's a favorite argument of his. So I was actually going to touch on that. Both of you raised great points there. I'm glad you read it carefully. It's interesting because this whole argument for infant baptism is so tied in to making it the equivalent to circumcision.
Like if you don't have that, the whole case falls away. And it's a very tenuous connection. I mean, wow. Certainly, as we would all say, in the New Testament, it's positioned as following repentance and belief, so that doesn't fit. And then circumcision was obviously just for boys in the Old Covenant. So what about that? That analogy breaks down there. There's a lot of problems there, and I've written about this in my book, about that link there. There's another argument he makes, which is really interesting.
So it's in Acts 19, where Paul, I'm not going to go through this quickly, but just try to scan this here. So Paul goes to Corinth, goes to Ephesus from Corinth, and he asked the disciples there, " Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? " And they say, " Well, you know there was a Holy Spirit. " And he says, " What were you baptized into then? " And they say, " John's baptism.
" And then Paul says, " John did baptize with the baptism of repentance, but he also said that they should believe on him who would come after him, which is Jesus. And when they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. " So this is a huge, huge problem for Calvin because this is a clear example where someone is baptized twice. What does the word Anabaptist mean? Yeah, baptized again. Ana in Greek is again.
And so Anabaptists and lots of people said like, hey, this is a pretty obvious example of where there was some kind of a defective baptism. In this case, it was John's, but the Anabaptists say theirs was defective because they didn't have faith and believe. And they say, this is an Anabaptist experience, a baptized again experience. So Zwingli and Calvin had conniptions over this. And so Zwingli and Calvin actually mentions this in the passage that you just read.
But Zwingli says that what's described in Acts 19 is actually teaching. So I'll go back and show this. When it says they were baptized, it's like, no, no, no. They were taught. And Calvin says the same thing. So it's in the Institutes of Christian Religion, his big book, and it's also in that same I'll show you in a sec. I admit for my part that it was the true baptism of John and one in the same baptism as Christ, but I deny that they were rebaptized.
And you think like, " Wow, you must have a total agenda if you cannot see that these people got into some water and were baptized again. " And so this is an excellent example of twisting the Scriptures. Let me pull this up here. So he says it a little bit clumsily here, at least in the translation. The same were conferred unto them by the imposition of Paul's hands, for there is no new thing that the name of baptism should be taken in such signification. So Calvin would say they weren't actually water baptized.
Paul put his hands on them and taught them. Yeah, John did baptize in water. It is also the accustomed use of Scripture to expound one word or sentence by another. It is said then in the next verse that Paul did baptize them in the name of Christ to expound what is meant thereby. It is added that he put his hands on them and the Holy Ghost descended. It is then but one thing expressed in two ways according to the use of scriptures we have said.
So he says it right here in that same piece that, " No, no, no, it's not baptism. Look the other way. Nothing there. " Okay, so I think this is just an amazing example of someone who is trying to prove what they want to believe by twisting the Bible. And this is one of my main gripes with Calvinism is they come up with this philosophical system and they take all these verses that don't fit and it's like shoehorn it in every possible way into the system.
We saw yesterday all those passages about God not wanting anyone to perish. It's like, no, no, no. He doesn't want the elect to perish. Even if it's the whole world, even if it's things in heaven on earth. No, no, no. It's got to be just the elect. And you just think, OK, you really need to drop your agenda and let Scripture speak. Another big problem, this is a great quote from Tozer. A lot of you know A.W. Tozer. He says, " What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
" And I like this because if you ask most people out on the streets here, what their picture of God is. And most people picture a grumpy old man who's like out to get you. And it's like the common picture. And I've even done this in churches where I'll ask people to say like, " Okay, when you think of right now, right this minute, like what do you think about God and what does God think about you? " And you know what most people say?
They say disappointed when they're asked like, " What does God think about you right now? " That's the first thing that comes to their mind is I think God's disappointed in me. And it's amazing how the picture of God that is out there and dominant through many streams, I'm not certainly not laying this all in Calvinism, but is one of an angry God, a punishing God, someone who's disappointed you.
And it's very different from what Jesus is trying to teach us with this loving father, prodigal son, father picture, who's like just waiting and running to grab you and hug you and kiss you. And so from the very beginning, from Genesis to our day now, the devil has engaged in a campaign to make you question the character of God, right? That's what he did in the garden. Does God really want your best? Does he really have your best interests at heart? Or is there in fact a different way altogether?
And so Calvinism, I mentioned this on day one. It impedes the character of God and it turns people from God. We're going to watch two clips now. Now you'll get these clips that we've done all that we have here. They're actually from Leighton Flowers who I've quoted from often, who I think has emerged as one of the premier people. He's a Southern Baptist who's now disputing with Calvinism. And I'm going to show you two clips. They're both pretty short. One is from a woman and one is a man.
So this is from a woman who renounced Christianity. And you'll hear why. Video that you can go back and watch if you want to. But listen to Megan Bell to go through Romans 9 from the Calvinistic perspective and ultimately stating as the reason she left Christianity altogether. Why does God allow that? So this is why I'm not Christianity. Well, so there's this passage in Romans 9. Well, it's not the other reason, I should say, but I have real trouble with this.
And I think it's still hard for me to say, " I think this is evil, but I think this is evil. " There's this passage in Romans 9 that talks about it gives this analogy of God as potter and humans as clay in his hands. And it uses the example of Jacob and Esau who, in the Bible, Jacob and Esau were twins. And it says, " While they were yet in the womb, before either of them had done good or evil, God loved Jacob and hated Esau.
" And it's what paints this picture of God, you know what if God willing to show His wrath and make His power known endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath made for destruction. So it says, " God created some people as vessels of mercy, people that He loves, and others as vessels of wrath made for destruction. So made for the express purpose of destroying them, of torturing them in hell for eternity. " And then Paul was writing.
He paints this picture, God making you do all of the things that you do, and then blessing some and cursing others. And he says, " Well, you're going to ask me then, why does God yet find fault for who has resisted His will? " Right? So if God's making you do it, why is he punishing you for it? Well, if God's making you do a horrible thing, you resist His will. You can't resist His will. And so He makes you do it, and then He punishes you for it? And the answer is, you don't get to ask that question. Oh.
The name of a man who I thought replies against God. So the thing formed, say to him that formed it, why have found baby does? You just don't need to ask that question. And to me, that's why this is I have asked. I spent a long time talking to Christians and people who were non-Christian because of this New Testament, but also talking to Jewish people about the Old Testament and found so many of the interpretations, so many of our beliefs, they're not fully supported by the Bible.
And that there are so many different ways of interpreting so many of the more destructive of our beliefs. But that one, I have not found any explanation for that path. It's anything that makes any kind of sense that's consistent with the text and not evil. And I thought I couldn't ask that question for so long. When I was at the church, right, I thought, " I just have to accept this. This is the truth. " And nothing that I feel or think matters against him. But now, I can't not think. I cannot ask the question.
Well, of course I go on to give answers from the Calvin's paper. Did you notice how she had it looked like to me she actually had that memorized at Romans 9. It didn't look like she was reading for anything. She had that in her mind. She was obviously very bothered by that. And it doesn't surprise me that she never found a coherent explanation there because all of us in this room, I think, had the experience when you read that. You're like, what in the world? How do I understand this?
So this goes to show, again, how real this is. A lot of people, when we talk about this, they roll their eyes, and they're like, oh, Calvinism. This is just theology. Who cares? This doesn't impact anybody. This is just debates that are pointless. Well, there is a person right there. And I think she's one of, I'm sure, many, many others. She's more articulate than most who can describe why. But I'm going to give you another example.
This is from an individual who was a very popular singer when I was when I was in college. His name is Derek Webb. And Derek Webb was a singer on a band called Caedmon's Call. And I very well remember many of us listening to his music. And he was pretty well known because their band was a Calvinist band and a Reformed band. So they actually put a lot of lyrics from more Reformed theology into their singing. And he also left Christianity. And so let's see why he did, and let's listen to his story. Oops.
That very point wasn't this? Yeah. A lot of that existed long before Christianity. So I don't know. I just choose not to have faith in that because I see no evidence of it needed to be being actually true. Yeah It could be. But I don't know. But their argument that it is tends to be A presuppositional argument. Yes, exactly. I think all apologetics are at their core presuppositionalist. Well, I think they have to be. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the denomination that I'm from, they're big.
They only apologize networks of precepts. Yes, of course. Phantom. Oh, yeah. But I mean, you know it's like so I just wanted to point out. Actually, that's the wrong clip there. I mean, it's ultimately saying the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true. God exists because He says He exists. And so. He gives a description here. Let me see. Where's the picture? Maybe it's earlier. Oh, there it is. Okay, let's try this one.
Oh, but it's one thing to read it, and it's another thing to hear it for yourself and to see him actually saying it. Yeah, here we go. So why don't we start right here by playing a clip of Derek Webb talking to a friend of his name, Matthew Cook. This was produced back in So this is Leighton Flowers, by the way. Not long ago. And I'm thinking of the 57 minute mark.
And this is where Derek Webb really explains, I think, you know ultimately why he left Calvinism and his argument against the whole concept and idea of how Calvinism in a sense is circular arguments and how he reasons that his faith is gone and ultimately because he's not chosen, which is some of the lyrics within a psalm and everything else. And so let's listen to this clip first, Steve, and then let's discuss it. Tricky, because Christianity is not a tolerant, open religion. It's not. Yeah. And it will be.
That's going to be a future thing. That's going to be very divorced from what we are. The experience that we have as planned on the violence. But the thing is, I remember the time to kind of be okay with that. I mean, hard as it was to have to be honest about it. Listen, this isn't my fault. Yeah I don't know why I get it some people don't. You know I go back to being 289. It has nothing to do with me. But I do, for whatever reason, see this.
Yeah And I wish I could I wish that I had a low period of telling you that you could behave any way that you wish. You could leave anything that you wish and that all those are going to go the same way. But that's just not what the Bible says. Tell me my story and I can tell you what I believe it says. And then you're going to have to reckon with that yourself. Yeah And I can't convince you I can pray. Things like that. We all depend on the Spirit. What's interesting is where I leave it now.
And with my Christian friends who try to convince me that, okay, listen, like I don't know why you're trying to persuade me because your own Bible says that it's a gift. The work of the Spirit starts to finish. It's a removing a horse and a replacement of a hard flesh. That is not something you can do for me. Yeah. So if it's true, we're both depending on spiritual. I'm literally in the graves next to Lazarus waiting for my name. Yeah. And I'm going to wait in their dead till he shows up.
Somebody asked me at the beginning of the year, what would it take for you to believe? That's easy. God would have to give me this. What it would take is a miracle. It would take a miracle. Yeah. What does it take for a dead man to come out of his to come six feet out of the ground? It takes someone to dig him out, to open a box and revise. And the Bible makes it very clear that there's nothing less spiritual than their background in salvation. Absolutely. New life. New life from death to life.
And that's what we require. Yeah. And I'm open to it. I'm living integrated way to hear my name. Yeah, anytime. And I won't be able to resist it. I can't call out for it. I cannot coax him over. Yeah Either my name has written the book by crypto. And I mean, so if we're going to really get into the language, the hard language is why the provocative it may be, I got to a point. I don't like binary ideas or statements, but there's a few that feel emotionally like they are, so maybe they're not.
But there's a point where I said, " You know what? Maybe God made me a passionate for starting. " Yeah, yeah, yeah. ' Cause he says he does. That's right. And he received no counseling about this. And so there's nothing I'm going to give to mind about it. So maybe it's all real and I'm just not chosen. And that's the thing I'm going to have to just that's just the thing I'm going to have to recognize. And that's what I was saying. Right. All right, we're going to stop there.
So by the way, Derek Webb was listed by the Gospel Coalition, which is the organization that Piper and Matt Chandler and David Platt and all those folks lead. He was listed as one of the top 50 most influential Calvinist leaders just a few years ago. And then he renounced it all. And that's how he reasons. And you heard it, right? Lazarus dead, vessels of destruction, Romans 9. I mean, all the same things we've been talking about. And he's saying, hey, I'm waiting. I can't do it. God's got to wake me up.
And so these are to go from being one of the top 50 leaders in America of the Young Restless and Reformed Movement to this, I think, says a lot. OK, so I'm just going to give a few more points here in our last five or so minutes. In Calvinism and Discipleship, so in the human mind, choice is deeply tied to meaning so much so that we don't know how to find meaning without choice. These are all quotes from Austin Fisher.
He makes a great point here, which is that when someone does something nice for you, when the husband buys flowers for the wife, what's touching about that is that he didn't have to. He chose to do that. And we derive our entire concept of meaning from the notion of choice. And he points out very admirably, we find meaning in Jesus dying for us because we believe He didn't have to. If Jesus had no choice, I'm not sure what we'd find in the cross, but I don't think we'd find any meaning in it.
It didn't mean anything. It just happened. And in Calvinism, you simply do not have a choice and therefore do not have a will that matters. So the questions, what do you do with your will? What will you do with your kingdom are rendered unintelligible? You may have the illusion of a will that matters, but if you pull back the curtain, God's will is the only game in town. Regardless of the passion, of the rhetoric, you crank out to make sense of it.
The fact is that God has already decided whether or not you will follow Jesus. Share the gospel, deny yourself and surrender your kingdom. Your will does not matter, at least not in any sense that we can make sense of. And he concludes by saying, " And yet you are expected to act as though it does. You're supposed to run on the treadmill and pretend you're running the race of faith. " This forces you into the awkward position of seemingly suspending your theology in order to live faithfully.
Because living faithfully requires living with meaning and living with meaning requires choice. You believe God determines all things and yet act as though your will is not completely determined. So very profound thoughts here that he's sharing. And you know I think it almost speaks for itself here, but I will say that the devil has many strategies to get people to lose heart or to be busy or to get distracted. This is a powerful theological strategy to do so.
There's other strategies he has making people " busy " which I think is another big problem we have today. But at a very deep theological level, this notion of stripping away our capacity for choice and meaning is right at the heart of why Calvinism is wrong. The problem of evil. So some of you, actually, a couple of you I think are going to be students at Sattler. We spent a lot of time on this. Most people say that the problem of evil is a contradiction. They say God is good, God is all-powerful, evil exists.
You can't have all three of these things together. Because if God really were good and he really were all-powerful, you wouldn't have evil. The standard answer that is given here, which I like to expand on and modify, is that that statement God is all-powerful actually needs a little bit of an asterisk on it. Because there is some sense in which God is all-powerful, but he actually chooses to delegate and to share his power with humans.
And there's a very meaningful delegation of power that exists, that he doesn't revoke until we die. And so for that reason, I don't really like that second bullet point, because I think it just needs a lot more explanation there. The reason that we live in this world with all of the death and murder and rape and kidnapping and sex trafficking and all that is because of that delegation of power.
When you take that away, when you take away that understanding that God has truly given us free choice and that we are made in His image, you know one of the things I often think about is that at creation, we were made in the image of God. And Calvinists seem to want us to be in the image of God without having that capacity for free choice. And I think, wow, that's not a very good representation of what God would be.
And so when you have this, when you have Calvinism there, you'll have things like John Piper saying, " Yeah, September 11th that was caused by God, " or a dirty bomb that wipes out Minneapolis is from God. And I say, " You know what? You totally missed it. " You have to understand this world in the context of warfare. And there are meaningfully other wills out there. The devil has a will that is different from God. He's not obeying God. And we need to cultivate this.
There's a quote that I often share, which is, " Until we come to terms with war as the context of our days, we will not understand life. " We will misinterpret 90% of what is happening around us and to us. So true. And those of you who come to Sattler will spend a lot of time going through some of the concepts on this as well. So we are seduced into sleeping. We are seduced into being passive in many different ways.
Calvinism is a theology, I think, although they don't say that overtly, and they say that you have to fight and struggle and all that. But I think at its core, when you strip away our capacity for choice, when you make God the sole will of the universe, and constructs like compatibilism, all of that is incredibly destructive to a true warfare mentality. OK, this is my last slide. So next steps, how do we go forward? I'll just give some recommendations here.
I've given you a lot of material, and this was only an introduction to a vast subject. Brother Clark and I were talking, and I was telling him that to really do this right, you would need to do probably like a whole week on every one of the five points of Calvinism. We can only just scratch the surface. So to really learn it, you'll have to do it on your own. And that's just the way that life is. I will say that 95 of 95% of my own spiritual growth has happened outside of Sunday services.
It's been my own just reading and listening to things and grabbing the bull by the horns and just doing it. So read, study, prepare yourself, especially when you're young. One of the good decisions that I made when I was young, especially between 16 and 30, was I just invested thousands and thousands and thousands of hours into reading and preparing myself and doing evangelism and getting out there. And it was incredibly helpful.
I'm also going to make a recommendation that you pick three to four teachers and listen to their sermons. So most people, I think, have this problem that they're just too scattered. They're just like all over the place. And you just grab this and grab that. They don't really have a systematic way that they're improving their own spiritual lives. And we try to put out as much as we can on the internet and using various formats to get it out. I would also recommend re-listening to those sermons with some regularity.
So like I mentioned, I do this with David Bercot, like every year or two. I kind of go back and listen to all those messages again. And I learn so much the next time around as well. And so do that. Find somebody good and just keep listening and do that again and again and again. You heard some great messages from Matthew Milioni. I think he'd be a great person. We put a lot of stuff on YouTube and on our website.
But pick some people and I would say especially have those three to four people be solid people that you can trust. That steady diet that we were talking about the other day. Don't have it be someone who's on the outside of the fold. Get mentored in evangelism. Wow, I could talk for a whole week just about this. Most people are very, very ineffective at evangelism. And I just think this is so important. And you're most productive when you're young at your capacity for evangelism.
Get mentored in prayer and learn how to pray. Again, something that I think, especially Anabaptist churches, are very weakened, is fervent prayer and corporate prayer. It tends to be more of a mechanical exercise, not always, but often tends to be. Some of you are going to be coming here. Consider coming to a place like Sattler doesn't have to be here, but I really just think that you just take so much training and preparation to be ready.
We have, in the class that I teach in the first semester, about 80% of our students come from conservative and ambassadors. I gave them a quiz in the beginning just assessing basics of their understanding of the Scriptures. Most people have been born and raised in the church. Most people score out of 100, about 20. But they don't know what they don't know. And you really just have a ton of preparation to do.
So if you come a place like this here, you can have four years, learn Greek, learn Hebrew, really get into the Word of God, really prepare yourself well. Again, it doesn't have to be here, but consider doing something like that where you intentionally prepare yourself. And then there's this quote that I like. If knowledge is power, then reading is your superpower. So try to devote 30 to 60 minutes every day for reading.
We live in an age I mentioned where attention spans get shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. As it turns out, the average book is 64,000 words in length. The average person, these are all averages, reads 200 words per minute. And if you do the math there, that means a book will take about 320 minutes to read. So that means if you do 45 minutes a day, that means you'll read a whole book per week. So it's not actually hard to read a book a week if you just are willing to spend that time.
I couple that with listening. So I do about two books a week because all my commuting and walking around time, my office is 20 minutes over that way. And so when I walk back and forth, the satellite is 40 minutes. And I listen at 1.25x speed. And so I get about an hour in just there walking back and then plus driving and subways and all that. I can easily do just with listening a book a week right there. So I'm listening to about a book a week and then reading a book a week. So that's two books a week.
That's about 100 books a year that you can do. And powerful, powerful. And don't be one of these people that has like 20 books that you're reading and you never finish any of them. Actually, just like pick, I think two is a good number. Read one, listen to one, and then just work through it. So that is the end. It's been a great set of sessions here. I hope you got a lot of it. Hopefully this will be a launch pad into lots of future discussion.
And hopefully, you can all wage the battle with us for the historic faith and join us in this struggle for rescuing souls. All right, let me close in prayer. Father, thank you so much for all these 10 sessions that we can have together. I'm grateful for the true privilege that I've had here to be with everyone and to share some of what I've learned over the years about Calvinism and the true faith.
God, I pray that You will give us a heart that breaks like yours breaks over all of these corrupted theologies that are designed to turn people from the simplicity and purity of what Jesus taught. I pray, Father, from the bottom of my heart that You will give us all a fire in our bones to be approved workmen who do not need to be ashamed, who can rightly handle the Word of truth, and that we will have zeal to share the gospel, to win lots of people to the Lord, and that that would be something that happens today.
I pray that everyone here will deepen their sense of risk and the significance of our choices, knowing that the choices that we make even today will affect our eternal happiness and the joy of others for an eternity. I pray that we would truly sense the capacity of our choices, the brevity of our lives, and how you are pleading, pleading and calling us to make the most of the very few days that we have on this earth.
So give us a heart of wisdom, Father, and may we be diligent servants that strive to honor King Jesus. His name we pray.