What Calvinists Believe About Election is Worth Repeating
An excerpt from a reply to someone about election and covenants:
It’s perpetual covenant renewal. By experiencing perpetual death and rebirth (“mortification and vivification”) you gain assurance of salvation, but you won’t know for certain that you are saved until the final judgement. Calvin held to three classes of election: the non-elect, the called (temporarily elected), and those who persevere (those who stand in the judgement). Calvin actually taught that the “called” were temporarily illumined by the Holy Spirit. Most Calvinists of the Neo-Calvinist resurgence are aware that Calvin believed this and hold to it.
Our God Pays His Servants
Justification/salvation is a finished work and is completely separate from sanctification/Christian living. There is only one connection between justification and sanctification; one precedes the other. Seeing the radical dichotomy between justification and sanctification is key to much needed revival among Christians. Fusion of the two in varying degrees is the spiritual cancer that presently plagues the Christian community in our day.
A good way to see the vast separation between justification and sanctification is the difference between gift and reward. A gift cannot be earned, but a reward is something that is earned. Something that is earned, or worked for, cannot be a gift. When your employer pays you, he/she doesn’t hand you a check while saying, “This is a gift from me to you.”
In the Bible, salvation is a gift, and kingdom living is rewarded. Calvinism tries to get around this dichotomy by using Covenant theology. Supposedly, Adam violated a covenant of works when he disobeyed God, and the Covenant of Grace is a gift to us by faith alone, but is a result of Christ fulfilling the Covenant of Works (the covenant violated by Adam) for us. This enables them to explain away the following:
Hebrews 6:10 – For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.
If God overlooked the work we do in kingdom living, that would make Him unjust. You can compare this to an employer who doesn’t pay an employee what they have earned. A reward is something you earn.
Calvinists say verses like this must be interpreted redemptively and not grammatically. In the grammatical interpretation, “your” means “you.” It is work done by you and you have earned a reward accordingly. If God overlooks what YOU have earned, that would make Him unjust. But if this verse is interpreted redemptively, it becomes the work Christ has done for you rather than by you. It is Christ’s fulfillment of the Covenant of Works that is being referred to, and your reward is salvation accordingly.
So, our “reward” is really a “gift.” And the “gift” is a reward given to us because the work is done by someone else. Hence, one cannot be a grammarian and Calvinist both. In addition, any claim by Calvinists that they use exegesis is not in the realm of reality. Covenant theology is clearly eisegesis. You must go to the Bible with a prism that can explain the contradictions that arise when sentences are evaluated by the plain sense of the words.
paul
The Protestant Reformation was NEVER About the Bible
It was brought to my attention yesterday that Mr. Reformation himself, John Piper, hands down the most popular Calvinist of our day and the “elder statesman” of the Neo-Calvinist movement, stated the following in The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin ( John Piper, Crossway Books, 2000, page 73):
We need to rethink our reformed doctrine of salvation so that every limb and every branch in the tree is coursing with the sap of Augustinian delight.
This is an outright admission that Plato is the foundation for understanding reality and the Bible. Augustine’s integration of Platonist philosophy with the Bible was well documented by Susan Dohse during the 2013 TANC Conference. Once one pursues knowledge in this information age regarding what was really going on during the Reformation, you see that it was nothing more or less than a philosophy war. You can take that literally because armies in fact brought swords and catapults to the theological debates going on during that time.
So, why did Martin Luther make Sola Scriptura a central focus of the Reformation? Due to the rise of the Age of Reason, the Bible being made readily available to the great unwashed masses was inevitable. Ingenuity invented the printing press, and the handwriting was on the wall. The masses were going to get a Bible in every hut, and it was obvious that Augustinian-like slaughter was not killing people fast enough to prevent mass distribution, so the next best thing was to mandate how people interpret the Bible. That’s what the Heidelberg Disputation was all about. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yes indeed, Scripture alone, but with what interpretation? Not the use of reason. To Luther and the Reformers, a serf believing in the ability to reason is like a toddler playing with a loaded gun. Basically, this is a discussion about grammatical interpretation using reason versus redemptive narrative. Those who would use reason to interpret the Bible were known as the “schoolmen,” and Calvin refers to them 69 times in the Calvin Institutes. The references are not complimentary. Like Luther, Calvin saw the use of reason to interpret the Bible as a rogue hermeneutic and antithetical to Platonist principles of philosophy.
This is an issue that has never been brought to the forefront among Christians for consideration even though most pastors preach via meta-narrative, and most Christians assume the use of reason to reach logical conclusions past, “I am a totally depraved person who can know nothing beyond the foolishness of the cross.” This is why Protestants are the most confused individuals on the face of the earth. Protestant pastors interpret reality in a totally different way than those being led.
And so it goes: Sunday after Sunday, the churches are full of parishioners trying to draw logical conclusions for living from a sermon designed to lead parishioners to one conclusion only: the only thing you can understand is that you cannot understand anything save that you deserve hell, and everything other than that is a an undeserved gift. Principles for living life? What life? Life isn’t for living, it is only to be praised as something done to us, not by us. The only thing we should be doing is hell, not life.
Therefore, if you raise a concern, or ask a question, this immediately reveals the fact that you just don’t get it. You are living for your own glory, and not the glory of the cross story. Knowledge and pride are inseparable, and of course, “pride precedeth a fall.”
paul
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
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