All right, I think we're ready to get started. Thank you to everyone for joining Engage the Faith today where we're going to take your questions, dig a little deeper for the purpose of strengthening all of our relationships with Jesus and His kingdom. My name is Clark Ray. I am one of the team members here at Sattler College on the Historic Faith Project. And today we're going to be talking with Finny, Finny Kuruvilla, about his recent course A Grace Worth Saving, Evaluating the Doctrines of Grace.
And all the questions we had today did come from the historic faith.com community. At the end, we'll have an opportunity for a little bit of a follow-up Q&A. During the session, if you have any questions about what we're talking about, about Finny's responses, feel free to post them in the chat, and we'll try to take a few of those at the end. We may not have time for a lot, but we'd love to have some follow-up questions. And I'll remind us partway through. So today we have Finny Kuruvilla, our guest.
He is an author of the book King Jesus Claims His Church. He is the founder of Sattler College, and he has a background in medicine and business. I personally know that he's most passionate about is the Kingdom of God and strengthening all aspects of that, namely discipleship and healthy churches, is I know a passion of his. So today we're going to get started with discussing Calvinism, Doctrines of Grace.
And what I want to start with is a quick snapshot from you about your own interest in the topic and your own history as a background discovering where you are today. Yeah, thanks, Clark. It's great to be here. So yeah, I started off in Calvinism when I was pretty young. I was born and raised in Southern California. And in Southern California, it's pretty well known for its megachurches. And one of the mega churches that I was quite influenced by through the radio and through books was John MacArthur.
And so John MacArthur is pretty well recognized to be one of the forefathers of the resurgence of Calvinism. So he and John Piper and a handful of others. And I remember my dad had a copy of one of his books in our house. Now my dad is not a Calvinist, but he had one of his books around and I started to read it and got pretty interested in it. And I listened to quite a bit of Christian radio. I ended up working in Christian radio for about three years when I was in late high school, early college.
And the airwaves are heavily, heavily dominated by Calvinist people like John MacArthur. And almost by default, almost by osmosis, not necessarily out of a rational, well-thought-out choice, I moved more and more into Calvinism. And I remember having this conversation once with my dad where he was not very happy about that. And I'm grateful that he waved a little bit of a cautionary flag. And he said, why are you reading these books? Don't be so influenced by Calvinists.
And I'll say in hindsight, what I think what happened was here I had my dad's library. He's got a fairly extensive library. He has an MDiv from Fuller Seminary. And in the context of that library, you know there's a certain set of books that are the ones that I as a person who enjoys thinking and meaty subjects, I think I gravitated more to those books because those writers in general were meatier, better writers, more structured, more thoughtful. And so it was really that that kind of brought me into it.
And so I was there living in that world, but then eventually I started to question it more and more. So I started to get more into the readings of people like Charles Finney and John Wesley. Charles Finney was kind of a complex person to categorize, but John Wesley was definitely an Arminian, very clear. And as I started to research it and read it now in a more informed way, I could see both sides of it.
It became abundantly clear that the Calvinist position was very skewed, and I ended up getting a whole stack of books from the library and just plot with those. Where were you in your life at that point? How old were you? I was in medical school then. So yeah, I was probably in my mid-20s or so. I was doing my MD PhD program. All your spare time you dove into. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's one of those things that you make time for the things that you love.
And I loved it, and it was, and it remains to be, to me, a very engaging topic that I personally think is incredibly important for how you view God, how you think of evil, how you understand events that befall all of us every day, what our view of salvation is, all those things are very closely connected to Calvinism.
Yeah, I really appreciate that, that even in all the busyness, it's important to actually remember the things that are actually important, take time to understand those things now versus later, and how that has impacted your life there. All right, so we're gonna move into the questions from the community. Excuse me. The first one I ask is from Charles Hood. And shout out to Charles Hood. He's one of our first members in the community, and he's constantly engaged on the forums.
I just want to say thank you for your participation throughout the last several months. It's people like you that makes all of this possible. And I just want to say thanks for really all you've done in the community, Charles. So the question from Charles Hood is, listening to the messages in the course entitled" A Grace Worth Saving," I was very surprised to hear that there is a resurgence in Calvinism today, including among many young people.
I would be curious to hear Finny's thoughts regarding why today's young people would be attracted to Calvinistic theology. Yeah. You touched on that a little bit. I touched a little bit on that, yeah, for myself. And I will say that it is, this is a great question, actually, and this is probably the best opening question that we can have about why we're doing this and why we're talking about this. So in general, I would say that we have the confluence of a number of factors that are leading to this growth.
So the first is you have this self-propagating system where a lot of the best speakers, when I say best, I mean most eloquent speakers, most gifted speakers, they're often Calvinists. And they're often training up young ministers and young people to follow in their footsteps. And so the paradigm of that would be someone like a John Piper. And so you have this whole ecosystem of people that have developed around that. And then institutions then develop supporting that.
And you get this positive feedback loop that is really a function of people following these very articulate, very diligent, and in many ways very impressive men that a lot of us would admire aspects at least of what they do. And they have been so strategic about publishing broadly. And so many study Bibles, by far, most of the books that are published in the general evangelical conservative community is going to come from Calvinists. They dominate the seminaries. There's a very strategic focus on cities.
So ministers like Tim Keller, who's in Manhattan, he has been championing that cause for many years and others have followed suit. And so they have seminaries, publishers, they have these large churches dominated with young people in urban, urban settings, and so the movement grows. There's an additional factor which is so you have this incredible strength over here and then you have over here a more watery goopy form of Christianity that is very common in a lot of America.
And this pop Christianity that is very much one where God is a self-esteem coach. It's this kind of therapeutic. Jesus is your boyfriend. Jesus is your boyfriend type type Christianity is it's something that I think a lot of people know deep down is just not how Christianity is supposed to be. And so when you have this contrast between this very sick watered-down Christianity where there's just not a lot of substance to it.
And then over here you have this well-oiled machine with very eloquent people who have a lot of books, a lot of tools at their disposal. It just it's a natural magnet to draw people into that. And so that's that basic factor is going on to this day. And I will say, and this is probably also a good thing to affirm there. As critical as I am of Calvinism, I'm very critical of it. I do think it's a deeply twisted unbiblical system.
I think we can also say that we admire the resourcefulness and the diligence of those who are on that side. They tend to be very intentional. They tend to be very studious. They study communication. There's a sense of boundedness too where they know who they are and they understand. They can articulate it. And they can articulate it. And of course, the acronyms and their various systems that they've put out are impressive, right?
And that sense of belonging, that sense of this is my tribe, I know who I'm with, is powerful. And we as human beings are attracted to institutions and systems where there's this sense of identity defining systems that help us. And so for all those reasons, I think we have a very formidable system in Calvinism that those of us who are not Calvinists have to contend with all the time. And my hope is through things like the historic faith that we're In Sattler College.
And certainly Sattler College Scroll Publishing, that we're developing an alternative which will hopefully provide a place for people to similarly be attracted to. Yeah, that's great. Next question is from Stephen Smith." I have heard recently in a David Bentley Hart discussion that Romans 9:22 through 24 are intended to be read as a wrong argument that Paul then disproves. This seems to be an interesting way to talk about it without having to encourage Jeremiah 18, but is this a satisfying reading?
Yeah, and I should say that in general, people have tried this strategy with Paul in a number of locations in his corpus. So the basic strategy for those who may not be as familiar with it is you take a section that is difficult to to believe or maybe not in line with your system. And you put it in quotes and you attribute that section to kind of a foreign voice that Paul is rebutting.
And so it's this tactic where you're creating an interlocutor and an interlocutor for those who remember the course is this sparring partner that you have in a letter where you've created a figure who's articulating a position and then you're then rebutting that position. And so in this discipline, one of the things that we have to ask then, is it valid to put quotes around any block of text that we don't like or that we may not like. And I'll tell you, people have done that to ridiculous extremes with Paul.
So anything controversial about women has often been, oh, that must be somebody that Paul is rebutting and we don't agree with any of that. And to the point where there are certain positions and pieces that I've read where people will argue for these huge blocks.
I mean, almost half chapters or full chapters of text will say," Oh, that's not Paul, that's all in quotes and that's some mysterious interlocutor that we're rebutting." The problem is, is that you've got to stand on good ground in order to do that because it's a bold move. It's a daring move to claim that we know who the interlocutor is when it's not especially fitting the normal conventions of what we see in places like Romans.
And one of the best places to know if we're on good ground is simply to go to the early church and ask, did they read an interlocutor into it? Did that follow the normal course of how they could tell a different voice in that? And when you look at people like John Chrysostom and Origen and others, they do not read an interlocutor. And I would also say that I actually like the Jeremiah passage. I think the Jeremiah passage is our friend. Yeah.
And so this is why, so for example, James White, who's a very strong Calvinist. He doesn't like that and he doesn't believe that in Romans 9, there's an allusion to that Jeremiah passage. Yeah, and so here's a very strong Calvinist who debates on behalf of Calvinism who says no, no, I don't want that. And I think there's a couple of reasons why we want to affirm that. I mean, one is it seems like it's obvious.
But if you go back and actually read that passage in Jeremiah, you'll see that he's talking about the nation of Judah, Judah slash Israel. And he's saying to them that if you relent, if you change, then you can be refashioned. And so there's a conditionality in it. And there's a corporate aspect to it. Yeah. And both of those elements are vital to understand Romans 9 accurately.
So those who remember from the course, one of the main thesis that we made in it was that Jacob I've loved, Esau I've hated, is not about individual Jacob or individual Esau. They support each other's, yeah, go ahead. Right, it's about the nation of Israel and the nation of Edom. Yeah And so we generally take Romans 9 as being a book about these larger corporate entities. And that's exactly what the allusion from Jeremiah supports. And so, hey, we like that.
And then, as I said, this conditionality that's clearly there if you look up that passage in Jeremiah. It makes sense why a Calvinist would want that to not be there. Exactly. It's very clear that there's some conditional aspects to God's decision making, how he's going to treat. In that case, the nation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The other part of Stephen Smith's question, the other question he had was, let's see, what time is it? 302.
You know I think we're actually, for the sake of time, we're going to give more people an opportunity to ask questions. So we're going to move on to Annette Miller. She asked, you mentioned people hardening themselves before God hardens them, using the famous example of Pharaoh. If a person continues to harden himself, do you think he can ever reach a point at which he is no longer able to respond to God? Yeah, I think that's, I would say yes.
And it seems like there is a point at which it's the point of no return where if one hardens oneself too far, then you can't come back. Now, where that is, we don't know. And as we talked about in the course, hardening is not a one-time event. It's a process. And even the fact that Pharaoh was hardened multiple times in that account of Exodus, it's not a one-and-done event. I think Both in his own self, hardening himself was multiple times. Correct.
It starts off with him hardening his own heart, and then eventually it says that God was hardening his heart. Yeah And so yeah, I think I think we can safely say from that paradigm, as well as some places like comparing from say Hebrews six, first Corinthians 10, places like that where there are these warnings that are given to us that if we proceed to sin flagrantly without the fear of God, then we may be well giving ourselves over to an irreversible state of being hard of heart.
And so that's something that, again, it's a fearful thing because we have no idea where exactly that line is. But it's something that I think we all need to be cautious about. Yeah, and then even beyond that, it also seems to play out in reality. That sin has a real impact on someone's ability to even make decisions. If they go far enough and hard enough, it seems to bear out in reality. Yeah, and they have their own consequences in the moment. Yeah, exactly.
And there's some pretty powerful examples, even in modern history, of people who were once professing Christians. They either dabbled with sin or they got some wrong-headed ideas in their mind, and they kept pushing in that direction. And today they're just utterly bitter and completely close to the idea of God. So yeah, we have plenty of case studies to see in real life. Yeah. All right, next question from Jonathan Martin. Oh, David Sinabra. Oh yeah. Next question from David Sinabria.
How important are the atonement models? This is a good question. Are the atonement models to Calvinism? Does it fall apart if penal substitution is taken out? I should say, hey, David. Congratulations on your new baby. Really excited for you. So yeah, the atonement is a great question. And it's something that even today is a major item of contention. So if you look at the most of the Calvinist community that is conversant with the nomenclature, they tend to be five-point Calvinists, the vast majority.
I don't know what the exact percentages, but certainly the vast majority are. However, there has always been, and there continues to be a fairly strong contingent of people that are so-called four-point Calvinists, meaning that they deny limited atonement. So the first example of that was a person named Moses Amyraut who lived in the late 1500s. And he penned a, I think a very skillful document where he outlined what we would today call something more like unlimited atonement.
And there has always been a basically ever since then and many people would argue that Calvin himself would have been in that position. So there's, yeah, so there's actually a lot of very interesting David Allen is one person. There are Bruce Ware at SBTS would be another person, very good scholars who would say that at the bare minimum, Calvin did not clearly articulate his views on limited atonement and that certain statements that he made indicate that he was perhaps even in favor of unlimited atonement.
So I think that in and of itself shows you that there's less cohesion with the L than exists between the U and the L and the T. So the unlimited atonement, the irresistible grace, total depravity, and probably even the perseverance of the saints. So that L's always been dangling for centuries, really. And I think I think really what the what it shows is that because it's biblically so difficult to come to the conclusion of limited atonement and we went through some of those passages in our course.
The system is more philosophically coherent insofar as it's a five-point system. And I think just on pure rational grounds, that makes more sense. But it's more biblically coherent if you take out the L. And so there's always been this delicate tug of war between the two of them. You know, I would say that when the question, as David posed it, was how important are atonement models to Calvinism.
I would say in general, there is a fairly strong emphasis on some of the satisfaction penal models in Calvinism that seem to have greater import there. But that being said, because there are so many people that have held on to the other four points without that fifth point, I think shows that there's at least the ability to be an intellectually satisfied Amyraldian, as they would say, those who follow in the steps of Moses Amyraut from the 1500s there and have a system that's relatively intact. Okay, very good.
Next question from Jonathan Martin. And this is a little bit longer, but I think it's a good question. What do you think of the concept? I'm going to read the whole thing and then I'll let you answer it however you see fit. What do you think of the concept of God having a perfect will and also a permissive will? Is this related to Calvinism in any way? And then he gives an example here.
In conservative Mennonite circles, there is a school of thought that says God has every detail of our lives planned out, even the time and the manner of our deaths. As an example, a young man died in a swimming accident. I heard his parents say it was his time to go, and if he hadn't drowned, he would have died in another way.
To me, it seemed more plausible that there were some poor choices involved, and he simply succumbed to the consequences of his actions, and their attitude had more in common with pagan fatalism than faith in God. I never thought of it before going through this course, but this way of thinking, but is this way of thinking a sign that Calvinism has affected us? And if so, what other ways have plain people, and I would argue, anybody been affected by Calvinism?
Yeah, and so it's a great question that Jonathan raised there. And I would say, first off, that that is an excellent example where I think Calvinism has indeed infiltrated our thinking. So this notion that we often hear of this perfect will of God and you want to be in the center of God's will, it's sometimes called the dot view where you can make a picture of this target, this bullseye, and you want to be right in the middle of that bullseye, right at that center point there.
You hear that all the time, I heard that all the time growing up, and you pray and you have all this angst, am I really in the center of God's will, and I gotta marry, and there's just one person out there for me to marry, and if I find that wrong person, well then the fabric of the universe is torn in some way because now I'm married the wrong person and the person I was supposed to marry marry the wrong person and you set this big chain of events out.
It's very common and as I said, I think it's something that causes a lot of angst. There's a whole cottage industry of books out there about finding the will of God. And I remember reading those when I was young with great interest. Because who doesn't want to know the will of God? Of course, yeah. Particularly when you frame it in that way. Yeah, exactly. And wanting God's best there.
I think what we can say is that, yeah, this is all this is nearly entirely something that is a corollary of the Calvinist system where you at least get this sense of there being this ideal plan out there. Now, I'm going to put a big asterisk on it, which is that the reason why it doesn't necessarily square with Calvinism is that in Calvinism, everything has already been decided. And you can't do differently than what's already been decided. You don't even necessarily have to have a decision. Exactly.
So on the one hand, it squares well in the sense that you have this notion that God has this perfect will. But on the other hand, it doesn't square so well there and so it's kind of this weird hybrid that is kind of Calvinist but kind of not. And so I wouldn't want to necessarily lay it at the feet of the Calvinist community per se. But it is something where it's unbiblical. We have no notion of this in Scripture.
I'm going to make another book recommendation here, which I didn't mention this in our session on the doctrines of grace, but it's called Decision Making and the Will of God by Gary Friesen. And I read that book when I was in, I think I was in college, I might have been in early medical school. And it totally changed the way that I looked at this whole question. I don't know how many of our listeners have listened to have read that book, but I would highly, highly recommend you. It's a great read.
It's a quick read. And the bottom line if I had to summarize what he would articulate is that we have been indeed given a level of authority and decision making. That's a meaningful level of authority in decision making. God does have a perfect will with respect to righteousness, with respect to following his commands. But in terms of do I marry this woman or that woman, or am I going to, in his example, do I drown today versus do I die of a heart attack in 30 years?
I mean, these are choices that are very much in our purview. And then God wants us to have this sense of authority over. And he would say the author would say that a better view instead of the dot view where you're aiming for this little dot in the center of bullseye is the wisdom view. And the wisdom view is that we are called to seek wisdom from above. The call from James. And really you can make all kinds of analogies from parenting, for example, where you and I are both parents.
And you know do we want our 18-year-old or 22-year-old to come to us and ask us what shirt to wear and who to marry and what to do with what to prepare for dinner? Of course not. We would say use good judgment. Use wisdom now. This is something where I think there's an analog there where God has given us tremendous gifts. He's given us the Holy Spirit. He's given us a community of people.
And when we make these decisions, we got to draw on those resources and not necessarily act like there's this dot that we've got to hit. And I've even heard stories of people having over what gas station to go fill like that. I mean, it's just like this thing can go to ridiculous extremes. I really like using the terminology angst in the concept of everyday decisions. I don't think God desires that. We're constantly unrest with things that he's given us ability to make decisions about. That's right.
And also I see the danger in marriage, especially like if I'm wondering if I'm with the right person that God wanted me to be with, I see that potential to feed all kinds of unrest or dissatisfaction or just all kinds of things that go wrong with that rather than realizing that God cares about my choices regarding righteousness, regarding His will, regarding His teachings. Yeah And that applies to any situation that we're in, and He gives us the ability to make those decisions.
And that gives me a lot of confidence and also faith in God that He will provide wherever I am, what's needed. All right, so we're going to go jump down to the last question here for time. There's a lot of other good questions. I just want to say thanks again to everybody that's submitted. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to get to all the questions.
But I wanted to wrap this up because I think it's really important because anytime when we disagree with people, it's important how we view the people we disagree with. And then Matt Miller asked," How should we view people who believe in Calvinism?" Yeah, you know, that's a great question. And it's something that in many ways is one of the most important conclusions that we can take away from all this. So I'll say a couple of things.
So because of Calvinism's basic stance on who God is, and we talked a lot about that in the course that the portrayal of God is one that I think any notion of justice or righteousness, it's difficult to square the God of the Bible with the God of Calvinism there. I would say and I recognize this is a strong statement to make, but that the Calvinist view of God is if not outright blasphemy is awful close to it where you are making statements about God. We talked about this in the course.
It's the idea from Roger Olsen that what's the difference between God and Satan in Calvinism? In some sense, God is even worse than Satan because Satan doesn't create humans, whereas God does. And in Calvinism, God is creating all these humans and then electing before the foundation of the world that the majority of his humans that he's made are damned eternally to hell. He foreordains it. He renders it. And so yeah, so we have this god who is morally, I think, absolutely horrific in Calvinism.
And so in the same way that I would look at someone who doesn't believe in the Trinity or I mean, I think this is even worse, maybe, who just has such a defective view of God. We ought to be reasoning with them and saying like, hey, consider what you're believing here. Consider what you are lifting up.
And with all of the talk of God's glory, with all of the talk of us wanting to lift up God's glory, which I would certainly agree with, why would we then completely counteract that with these depictions of God that are so contrary to I would say both the Bible and then any reasonable sense of what justice and goodness look like. And so I think I think there is a just cause to plead with them on that basis. The other thing I'll say is the P and perseverance of the saints.
So a lot of people when they hear Calvinism, they think, oh, it's just so theoretical and theological and unconditional election and limited atonement. I don't get it all. But when you think about the P, the Perseverance Saints, that's probably the most practical of all the five, right? And it's the one that you can forget about all the complex theology about and just answer the question, what does the Bible teach on this?
And there's a I don't know if there's some way we can share it, but I was I had shared it this morning with Bryant that there's a great document that I originally got from Scroll Publishing where I modified a little bit, but it's a list of 86 passages and verses from the Bible that all affirm conditional salvation. So it's things like the parable of the vine. So you know if you stay in the vine and you are fruitful, then you'll stay. If you're not, then you'll be cut off.
The olive tree and the natural branches, the unnatural branches, Paul obviously says the unnatural will be cut off. The parable of the man who is forgiven a great debt like millions of dollars and he goes and chokes someone who owes him a few pennies or a few dollars and he's thrown back into prison and 1 Corinthians 10, I mean, there's there's so many places in the Bible where this is affirmed.
I always like to point this out that as far as I can tell, and I'm open here to revision, but Augustine did not believe in perseverance of the saints. The Lutherans didn't believe in perseverance of the saints. It's such a peculiar teaching that it took 1,500 years for anybody to find this. And even then their fellow reformed compatriots didn't go along with it. So it's so biblically outlandish. And so again, to have a view that is so contrary to plain, easy passages of scripture.
It's hard to just say," Oh, that's fine." So I in general take the posture of trying to have conversations and say, don't believe this. Consider coming back into the fold of the true historic faith, the true faith that's been once for all delivered to the saints. And in doing that, I believe God will bless you because you're upholding his honor. You are promoting a system that the biblical system that is much more glorifying to him.
And then frankly, I think once you get into this Calvinist mentality, where the way that they read passages, it is very rare that you will ever find a Calvinist who strongly affirms things like non-resistance, separation from the world, not swearing oaths, you know, some of the bread and butter teachings. And again, you think like, how is this possible that you miss all those things despite the very strong biblical emphasis?
But I think it's because there's such allegiance to this system that's been imposed onto the Bible that they're able to then take other passages that similarly don't align with their system. And so there's a lot at stake in this because you have, at the root of it, you have this pre-commitment to a system, to this man-made, relatively late system over and against the simple, luminous, beautiful words of Jesus and his apostles there. And I don't like that setup.
Now, I'm not saying that every last Calvinist is lost or anything like that by no means. But it's a dangerous place to be. And I think I would urge those who can to have dialogue. And I think something like watching these lectures, reading some of the books that we referred to in the course, I think that would be an excellent thing to do just to raise awareness.
And I'll tell you right now, there's just such a lack of even knowledge of the counter, knowing that there's another well-thought-out articulate view on the other side. And when, in fact, I've been having conversations with two young men, very smart young men, and both in their 20s, both Harvard graduate students. They had not read and experienced the other side. And I've been getting emails over the last couple of weeks with these light bulbs like," Wow, I didn't know about this. Who are these people?
Who are these authors?" And these views make so much sense. And so I think it's an enterprise that's well worth it. And hopefully that will be the beginning of a journey of that individual to experience a whole new depth to their Christian walk that involves a lot more just simple reading of Scripture that I think they will find incredibly refreshing. That's really great. I appreciate that.
And I think the thing that I've noticed, and I'm not real well versed in the principles of Calvinism and the roots of it and where it all came from. But it seems like the strong idea and desire to engage in the sovereignty of God has unfortunately blinded what God is actually saying. And that's unfortunate because they're very counter to each other and what seems good ends up being the worst thing possible.
Yeah It's very sad and looking at that as an opportunity to engage with those on the other side of this debate and a healthy discussion. I really appreciate that. At this point, I don't think we have any follow-up questions, Bryant. Did anything come through? We don't have a lot more time anyways. We wrap up at 3:25 sharp. So I just want to end there. I want to say big thanks to the team here at Satler, the historic faith team, Bryant, Timothy, Marcus. They've all been integral in making any of this possible.
Thank you to Finny for coming and doing this and for the work you put into that course. I look forward to maybe some more opportunities in the future on the historic faith. And obviously none of this would be possible without the actual community, our subscribers, those that are engaging with each other in discussions. We just really, really want to thank you guys for all of that.
And we hope that if it's been beneficial, if it's been helpful, that you'll share it around with others, that we can continue to grow the community and hopefully be a blessing that strengthens all of our love faith relationships with Jesus and His kingdom. Thank you. Amen. Thanks.
No materials available for this lesson.