Jerry Walls
Jerry Walls lectures on Calvinism:
Jerry Walls points out that John Piper gets it wrong when asking: “How does a Sovereign God love?”, since he should be asking, “How does a God who is love, express His sovereignty?” Remember that God defines Himself as love. That’s just a fact. No one can dispute it. So, then, the question becomes: How does a God who defines Himself as love, express His sovereignty? The problem with Piper is that by asking, “How does a Sovereign God love?”, he is basically engaging is Circular Logic, because by “Sovereign God,” he means to say, “Sovereign God [as understood by the particular doctrines of Calvinistic Reformed Theology].” So he is not starting from the biblical premise of 1st John 4:8, but starting from a Calvinist perspective, and then seeking to harmonize God’s love with the already established presumption of Calvinistic sovereignty. Calvinists do this often, and they don’t even seem to realize it, and it’s what keeps them boxed in as Calvinists.
Jerry Walls makes a great point by establishing the nature of “freedom” as understood by Arminians vs. Calvinists. For the Arminian, true freedom is in the Libertarian sense, while for the Calvinist, freedom is expressed from the previously established presumption of Determinism (remember this circular theme?) resulting in “compatibilistic freedom.” The result for the Calvinist is that God could have taken any particular Calvinist, and made them as clay into Adolf Hitler, in which they would have “freely” done every wicked thing that Hitler did (having been hypothetically decreed), or just as easily have decreed that Adolf Hitler would have “freely” (by the compatibilistic understanding of freedom) come to Christ and have been like Paul or Peter or Elijah or Moses, instead. The problem is that when humanity is viewed in this manner (and not in the manner of clay described at Jeremiah 18:1-13), then God loses any special connection with mankind, as mankind merely becomes a set of interchangeable parts, as one could be the other, and the other like the former, as it makes no difference, except that God happened to decree the one, in one way, and the other, in the other way. But when reading John 16:27, I get the impression that God particularly loves us (not as interchangeable parts) but instead, based upon something unique to us: “For the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came forth from the Father.” Now if we are merely interchangeable parts, as per Calvinism, then I fail to understand the basis for why God is saying that He loves us, since God is rooting the basis for His love in the fact that we love His Son, who is an expression of Himself. (Hebrews 1:3)
