Truth Unchanging

Dec

Does God Cause Evil?

Categories: Uncategorized

The answer to this question depends on the sense in which one understands “evil.” If “evil” is being used to refer to adversity, the answer is clearly “yes.” In Isaiah 45:7 we read, “I form the light, I create darkness, I make peace and create evil [adversity or calamity]; I, the LORD, do all these things.” and in Amos 3:6b “If there is evil [adversity or calamity] in a city, will not the LORD have done it.”

If one is talking about moral evil, the answer depends on the meaning of “cause.” If by “cause” one is referring to the proximate cause of sinful actions, the answer is an unqualified “no.” God is not allured to sin and does not allure anyone to sin. God does not put evil thoughts and desires in the hearts of otherwise good people to bring about wicked actions.

It is not unusual for non-Calvinists to accuse Calvinists of believing that God causally determines all that will occur in His world. This accusation is only true in the sense that evil would never have existed had God not purposed to permit it to occur in his universe, and he has determined to permit sinful events to occur so that he might demonstrate his glory [the sum of his glorious attributes].

Those who oppose the Calvinistic view seem to imagine that Calvinists believe the manifestation of God’s glory involves somehow making God more glorious than he is or that somehow intending wickedness to occur and providentially using the sinner’s fallen nature to bring about his sovereign purpose gives God more glory than would intrensically belong to him. In reality, nothing can make God more glorious than he is. The issue is that God could never have demonstrated his grace and mercy had he not determined to permit sin to enter his world. Conversely, he could never have demonstrated his holiness and justice apart from sin’s entrance.

The issue here is whether evil would ever have entered God’s world had he not determined to permit it. Keep in mind that one must distinguish between permitting evil to enter and determining to permit its entrance. God does not merely and passively let sin occur. God has determined to permit evil to occur because he has a purpose for it. That does not mean that God must insinuate evil thoughts and desires into a sinner’s heart and actively cause evil to occur. When we say that God has determined all that occurs in his world and is sovereignly superintending all according to his eternal decree, we do not mean that God is the proximate cause of all that occurs. The proximate cause of and the blame for any and every sin is to be found in the sinner’s nature and not in the divine decree.

Of course, those who believe in libertarian free will cannot understand this since according to their enigmatic view, what is in a person’s heart can have no part in determining their choices or actions. This idea, of course, flies directly in the face of Jesus’ teaching about what defiles a person. He said, it was out of the heart, the control center of a person’s being, that “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, false witness, blasphemies, occur (Matt. 15:19). There is a vast difference between saying that God has determined to use the evil that lies in a sinner’s heart to accomplish a good purpose and saying that God puts evil thoughts and desires in sinner’s hearts, causing them to sin, in order to bring about a good purpose.

Jan

The Calvinist’s Basis of Authority

By gracewriterrandy 1 Comment

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Paul's Passing thoughts

Today, I discovered an article that was written ostensibly to provide non-Calvinists instruction for effectively confronting those who believe in God’s effectual grace. The author who is the comical side-kick of a disgruntled former member of a church named Clear Creek Chapel in Ohio, USA, seemed completely confident that he could tie Calvinists in knots by merely asking if they agreed with everything Calvin wrote [Who agrees with everything any other mere human being writing apart from divine inspiration has written?]. I could not suppress the overwhelming conviction that this man is simply profoundly ignorant. No informed person is going to suggest that a Calvinist is a person who is a follower of John Calvin or a person who agrees with all that Calvin wrote or said. Additionally, a Calvinist is not a person who necessarily agrees with everything written in the Canons of Dort or the Westminster, London Baptist, Philadelphia Confessions. The term “Calvinist” is merely short-hand for a person who believes in soteriological monergism. It describes one who believes as A. M. Toplady wrote, “Thou must save and Thou alone.”

According to this man, you must simply ask a Calvinist if everything Calvin wrote was inerrant. If he wrote anything that cannot be substantiated by a clear reading of the Scriptures, then Calvin must have been a heretic. In other words, either everything Calvin wrote was without error, or nothing he wrote can be trusted and he was a heretic. That would tend to render everyone who has ever written or spoken anything a heretic.

I want to suggest a couple of ideas for you to consider. First, as indicated above, we are not followers of John Calvin. We do not agree with everything Calvin did or everything he taught. If we cannot find a basis for his doctrine or his practice in the Scriptures, we simply reject it.

Secondly, being wrong about a particular aspect of biblical doctrine does not make one a heretic. No one claims inerrancy for Calvin’s writings and a handful of errors in his voluminous writings does not make him a heretic.

Finally, when we quote from Calvin, the Canons of Dort, or from one of the Confessions mentioned above, we do not do so as an authoritative basis for our beliefs. We do not regard any of these as our authority. We simply quote them to give definition to our doctrines. If you wish to know what we believe, don’t consult books written by soteriological synergists like Dave Hunt . Go to our Confessions or Canons. Interact the doctrines that are articulated in them. That should at least give us a solid basis for meaningful discussion.

Dec