Calvinists disguise and carefully choose words to
state what they believe--this has always been a concern for me.
"Calvinists"
are not disguising anything, it is the non-Calvinists that is...I will elaborate
more on that a bit later. In terms of carefully choosing words to state what we believe, I’d like
to make two points:
First, we have found this necessary because of the many misconceptions
and misunderstandings that people have with regard to what we believe.
A lot of this has to do with the acrostic TULIP.
The acrostic,
which was devised to be an aide to help people remember the main points of
defense of orthodox Protestant Reformed theology against the Arminian view, can
be more trouble than it's worth. The reason many of us don’t care for the
acrostic is because the terms are given to a tremendous amount of
misunderstanding. Very often people think they have an idea of what Reformed
people believe based on the words of the acrostic themselves (i.e., Total
Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace,
Perseverance of the Saints). They then base all of their objections to the view on their
misunderstanding of those particular words in the acrostic.
In other words, very often they never deal with what is taught within
in each point. All they do is hear
the words “Limited Atonement” or “Irresistible Grace” and then attack
those words instead of what is really being taught by those words.
Thus, we are trying to clarify what we believe and why we believe it.
The sad thing is, even after we do that, we find people who simply refuse
to listen, and continue with the same misguided misrepresentations. Dave
Hunt is a classic example: What
Love Is This
I would also add that to be careless in the statement of what we believe is to be careless in our handling of the Bible, and to be careless in our handling of the Bible is simply inexcusable. I believe that this largely accounts for why so many in the Evangelical church are confused about these very issues. Preachers have been so imprecise from the pulpit concerning the very nature of the Gospel as to make the Bible itself one massive volume of contradictory nonsense. They want to affirm a sovereign, omnipotent God, while at the same time maintain that God can't do anything unless man lets Him! Is there anything more absurd than that?! And yet, that is "boldly" proclaimed from the majority of so-called Evangelical pulpits today. I would argue that it is they, not us, who are disguising what they are saying. They want to proclaim that God is in control, and that nothing can thwart His will and purposes, but that is merely a disguise for what really lurks beneath: a purely humanistic philosophy that makes man's "free will" decision the measure of all things, and has God on the outside, helplessly looking in while His supposedly sovereign will and purposes are indeed thwarted over and over again.