There is No Such Thing as Calvinism

June 5, 2010 1 Comment

John Calvin's Beautiful (Purported) Grave

(Back by popular demand. -Jay  ;)

By M. B.

One thing that amazes me when I read Reformed people’s arguments against Rome is not so much what they say about us, but the gall and arrogance they have to even say anything at all.

The funny thing about the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate is that there is no such thing. What? That’s right. Calvinism does not exist, at least not any more than the Ku Klux Klan does. Oh sure, there are still several groups that run around in rural communities in the South, calling themselves everything from “The Traditional Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” to the “International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”. But everyone knows what Nathan Bedford Forrest started over a century ago after the War Between the States has long since disbanded, only be revitalized by kooks, losers, and provocateurs trying to keep the torch aflame every other decade or so. And the ironic thing is that they’re trying to revitalize some thing that, any student of history knows, would not be blessed by the men who first established it to fight Yankees and carpetbaggers.

And it’s the same with Calvinism, with its “Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly” and “Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States ”. These amounts to little more than malcontent American whites trying to revamp a failed experiment, some thing that has long since been swept away into the dustbin of history. Read more of this post

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Response to Turretinfan on the Crucifixion

May 22, 2010 3 Comments

Part 7 from our old interaction

By: Jay
Turretinfan responded to the accusation that the strict legal imputation view must necessitate a damning, forsaking, cutting-off, or separation (choose whichever term you wish) of the Son from the Father. He writes:
“The Father that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all, shall also freely give us all things (Romans 8:32). This was no pagan sacrifice, but a fulfilment of the pious type (“type” in the sense of “shadow”) that Abraham provided by offering up Isaac his son (Hebrews 11:17-19). Jesus was stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted (Isaiah 53:4) and it pleased the LORD to bruise him, to put him to grief, and to make him an offering for sin (Isaiah 53:10). Nevertheless, God did not utterly forsake him, but raised him up on the third day when the work to obtain our justification was complete (Romans 4:25).”

Read more of this post

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Theos sesarkomenos: The First Response to Turretinfan on Nestorianism

April 17, 2010 1 Comment

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” –St. John’s Gospel, 1:14

“Why do you incessantly call Mary ‘Theotokos’?” –Julian the Apostate, (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, Vol. I, pg. 241)

“With all reverence let us praise the light of the world, the great orator and champion of the Mother of God; for by his fiery teachings he burned the heresy of Nestorius. Wherefore let us cry to him: O divine Cyril, intercede with Christ to strengthen the orthodox faith.” “Thy teaching has reached to the ends of the earth. For from the wellsprings of the Savior, O blessed one, thou hast poured forth a flood of doctrine which engulfs all heresies.”

 –Eastern Troparion and Kontakion of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Patriarch and Doctor

By: Jay Dyer

Calvinist polemicist Tur8infan of Dr. James White’s Alpha & Omega Ministries has written what he perceives to be a response to the accusation I made that Calvinists are Nestorians, in that they end up denying the henotic union. He has issued an informal challenge, intending on doing a 13-part response to all of my claims about the implications of Calvinist theology, which I showed were Nestorian when brought to what Van Til called “epistemological self-consciousness.”

I couldn’t have dreamed of a better statement from him of his views, since he has admitted two of my accusations in his first response. This will not be difficult to dissect, and I hope for readers with an open mind to pay close attention, and by God’s grace, better their theology.

Tur8infan begins: Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh (Romans 8:3). Christ, however, (and only Christ) was immaculately conceived. He was like the sinful flesh of Mary from whom he (after the flesh) came, but his flesh was not itself sinful. He was a true human, but he was the second Adam. He was not under Adam’s federal headship and he did not inherit Adam’s fallen and depraved nature. This is, of course, not only the Calvinist position but also the position of at least most of the major early church fathers who addressed the subject. Read more of this post

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James White’s Open Trinitarian Error

April 14, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay Dyer

Granted, this is vintage Alpha Omega Ministries, and maybe James White has changed his position since then, and if so, I will gladly retract this post. However, as it stands, it’s pretty bad. White tries to explain the Trinity in this post and says much that is good (even citing St. Gregory of Nazianzus at one point), but due to an incomplete understanding of classical Trinitarian orthodoxy, he makes a fundamental error. White argues as follows:

“One of the characteristics of personal existence is will. Few would argue the point in relationship to the Father, as He obviously has a will. So too, the Son has a will, for he says to the Father in the Garden, “not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39) The ascription of will to the Persons indicates the ability to reason, to think, to act, to desire – all those things we associate with self-consciousness. As we shall see later, there is a difference between nature and person, and one of those differences is the will. Inanimate objects do not will; neither do animals. Part of the imago dei is the will itself.” Read more of this post

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Response to Some Standard Protestant Objections to the Deuterocanon

April 11, 2010 1 Comment

By: Jay Dyer

A Reformed Protestant apologist recently sent me several objections to the Deuterocanonical Books. These are the books which are included in the Catholic and Orthodox canons, but were removed from Protestant Bibles, originally by Luther. As it stands, his objections are standard, with a couple new ones I had never heard (but which are easily refutable). I decided it would make a good article, since generally, reformed apologists rehash the same tired, old arguments and rely on straw men. One good example is the repeated claim that we think they are canonical because they are cited and alluded to by New Testament authors. This is not true. This is simply a response to the constant Protestant claim that they are never cited, showing it to be false.

Another good example, as will be seen below, is the claim by Protestants on the one hand that citation doesn’t prove canonicity, while turning around and arguing that since Peter quotes Paul, somehow Protestants can magically have a canon without any Church or any Tradition. This contradicts the first claim that citation doesn’t prove canonicity (as all agree), and begs the question, for it assumes apostolic authorship of the said Petrine text, which, like Matthew and other Gospels, cannot be known apart from Patristic Tradition. It’s really quite simple.

Objection 1: the DC is not Scripture because Pope Gregory himself did not consider it canonical. Read more of this post

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More on the Manichaean Gnosis of Luther and Calvin

April 10, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay Dyer

Still trudging through the voluminous Books Against Eunomius by St. Gregory of Nyssa, there is a literally a treasure trove of lucid argumentation and points that can be applied to many modern errors, especially as they are found in “reformation Christianity.” Almost every other page finds St. Gregory refuting some error found in Luther and his heirs. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Manichaean error often attributed to Luther and the reformed, who believe that human nature has itself become evil. This has been repeated ad nauseam by reformed friends and others I have debated, such as Turretinfan.

In their view, nature was good until the Fall, after which, it became alienated from God and totally depraved. Corruption, for them, is equivalent to evil itself, and evil is given a reality–evil becomes created being. Most of them would not affirm that God created evil as some kind of entity, but they hold that after the Fall, both angels (that fell) and men are now evil, inherently. Their very being–to its very core, is evil by nature. So, evil is given a substantial reality, and is in fact identified with God’s creation. Some Protestants may want to demur here, and insist that it’s not God’s creation, but how is it that nature “is evil,” with the is of identity, given that God is the author of nature?

Again, Luther argued in The Bondage of the Will that humanity had lost its capability for free will. Calvin said the human will could will nothing good before God, whatever “civil righteousness” might be performed. The point that these reformed guys still aren’t getting is that evil is not a thing: it is not a substance. Turretinfan tried to come up with some argument that I treated human nature as a “thing,” when this is his failure to understand enhypostatized–that human and divine nature only exists in the mode of persons. But this doesn’t make nature the same as or necessitate collapsing it into person as the reformed do, all day long. Read more of this post

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