The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Is the god of Calvinism a moral monster?

In a short video, Justin Taylor explains why he thinks such an assertion does not hold water:

youtube.com/watch?v=NixHG8NUmQY

Do you think he was partially successful?

When I get a few minutes I will listen to that, but a quick comment: for the Calvinists I know personally, and some of them are dear to me, the starting point is always SOVEREIGNTY. With that unqualified starting point, they can justify anything to themselves. And they do get testy when “God is Love” is mentioned.
I like a line I read in Jurgen xxxxx’s book (forgot last name) “God as the Mystery of the world” - roughly: the power of God must pass through the eye of the needle of God’s Love.
Something like that.

I’m looking forward to your review as well as to that of other people.
The video is pretty short and was a part of “Hellbound” by Kevin Miller.

Hello Son of Lothar

No, not at all. Like pretty much all Calvinist apologists I’ve come across, Taylor fudges his answers and ends up in a hopeless spiral of contradiction and evasion. Notice how he starts trying to answer the charge that he would be the world’s worst Dad if he didn’t try and save all his children. He starts blustering about how we can’t extrapolate ‘vertically’, as he puts it, up to God, from this ‘horizontal’ human standard of loving behaviour. But he never explains why we can’t do this. His answer, such as it is, is that we shouldn’t take our human ideas about loving behaviour and project them onto God. Rather we should take God’s behaviour and take that as defining loving behaviour - in other words, if God is love and he only chooses to love some of his children, then that’s actually what love is.

Which is, quite frankly, a bunch of crap. It’s a bunch of crap not just because it’s logical impossible - if God is love, which the Bible and moral philosophy say He is - then he is logically incapable of acting in a way that is not loving. It’s a bunch of crap not just because applying that rationale in reverse would mean that it would actually be loving of us to only love some of our own children. No, it’s a bunch of crap because the Bible says it is, and because Jesus says it is - although not in those exact terms, obviously :smiley: .

And when Taylor is challenged on this, he again fudges his answer. When confronted with Jesus’ example of unconditional, universal love, and with Paul’s emphatic statement in 1 Corinthians 13 that love never fails, he tries to adopt some sort of Scriptural high ground, claiming that Reformed theology looks at the whole narrative of Scripture, not just the ‘details’ as he calls them of universal love. When of course the real meta-narrative of Scripture, if you open your eyes to it, is one of God’s relentless, universal, saving love for all His creation.

So, nice try Mr Taylor - and he seems such a nice chap :smiley: - but no cigar. Not even a cigarillo :laughing: .

Cheers

Johnny

All right, Johnny. I agree, although I wouldn’t quite put it as emotionally or use as explicit language as you.

Here is what John Stuart Mill once said:

"To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology,
that God may possibly not be good?" ~John Stuart Mill

I did not know it was JS Mill who said that - others have picked up on it for sure.

Balthasar: I believe in the sovereign freedom of the love of God.

Moltmann, Dave? First thing that popped in . . .

Great quote from Balthazar, too!

Calvinism is cognitive dissonance defined, imo. God is love, but oh – not like the love in 1 Cor 13, but some other kind of love – the kind where you torture the ones you love forever and ever or at best, snuff them when you could have reformed them and saved them, so everyone will know how powerful and “just” you are. Um . . . moral monster? Yeah.

Good point Jonny, though I am (slightly) less emotional :slight_smile:

I think that it is not only extremely unlikely that a perfectly loving being would condemn his creatures to eternally suffer before they were born, but that it is an (implicit) logical contradiction.

At the end of the day, believing that the Calvinist god loves the non-elects is akin to believing in the existence of a square circle.

When I get a few minutes I will listen to that, but a quick comment: for the Calvinists I know personally, and some of them are dear to me, the starting point is always SOVEREIGNTY. With that unqualified starting point, they can justify anything to themselves. And they do get testy when “God is Love” is mentioned.

Yes they act as if only the Calvinist god can be sovereign even though God is quite sovereign whether or not he micro manages every action or not.
The Calvinist simply looks at God intervening in certain things and projects that behavior over every single action that has happened in the universe.
Then to back their belief up they read into certain bible verses more then was intended by the author.