Calvinism and Arminianism:
Myths & Realities
Calvinist, James White: “For some reason, [Dave] Hunt prefers a God who created without a purpose and decree – even though He fully knew that His creation would be filled with senseless, purposeless, gratuitous evil and suffering! That is the price of libertarian freedom, and it is a price Mr. Hunt seems willing to pay.” (Debating Calvinism, p.192, emphasis mine)
But Calvinists seem to prefer a God who is the origin and mastermind behind all evil, having imagined things like child demon possession, witchcraft, the Occult, incest and homosexuality, based upon no example from an independent being, but having self-dreamed it, and then decreed it to exist…for His glory, as a Calvinist would say. For Calvinists, that’s somehow better. Moreover, God himself disavows that He is the mastermind behind evil. Consider Jeremiah 32:35, for example.
One Calvinist asks: “According to Arminianism, God knows who will choose Him, and who will reject Him, before they're ever born? So that means that God knows who will reject Christ, and be condemned to Hell prior to creating them, yet He creates them anyway?”
Yes, and the answer is found in the parable of the “Wheat and the Tares.” (Matthew 13:24-42) Mankind is interconnected.
Example: If God prevented the birth of someone that He knew would grow up to be an unbeliever and ultimately perish, what if God also knew that his son would grow up to become a believer and become saved? If God prevented the birth of the father, what do you think would happen to the son? By getting rid of the father, the believing son is also eliminated. In this way, mankind is interconnected, and which is why God commands that the angel wait until the end, in order to sort it all out: “But he said, ‘No; for while you are gathering up the tares, you may uproot the wheat with them. Allow both to grow together until the harvest; and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather up the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them up; but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” (Matthew 13:29-30)
Furthermore, God denies that He is the origin of the tares: “An enemy has done this!” (Matthew 13:28) But according to Calvinism, the “enemy” is the One who decreed all things, as per James White.
Calvinist Charge: In Arminianism, God allows Evil to be Born.
Myth or Reality: Calvinists feel that it is more honorable if God created evil purposely, than to allow evil to occur by His permission, which He could otherwise have stopped. For instance, the Calvinist asks, why does God allow evil people to be born, that He knows full well, would grow up to reject Him?
