This comment was left by someone identified as Will at Roger Olson’s blog on his post, “Needed: Robust Arminian Theology for Lay People (Especially Youth)”:
I completely agree. I just want to say thanks Roger for your defense of Biblical truths, to me you are truly a God send. After falling away for years I came back to Christ in isolation having the online sermons and books of Piper, John Mac and other reformed preachers as my primary resources after the reformed biased but brilliant ESV study Bible. It was as if my faith as a youth was but a beautiful mirage where I had dreamed God was good and had died for everyone and wanted to save everyone. Owing to their popularity and intelligence and that of many of my reformed family in Christ, I came to the realization that their views were orthodoxy and true. I was devastated. I had returned to a horrific nightmare in which the Bible could not be read by a simple man plainly, that the gospel must contradict itself, that Christ lied, and worse, he had created billions of souls to be dammed to hell for all eternity for his glory. In dark moments I wished I had never been born into this hopeless bleak universe, with a God who truly terrified me being the author and controller of all sin, evil, and Auschwitz. Listening to Calvinists say I should be glad that I was saved and chosen depressed me greatly, for what about my dad, wonderful friends and other folk who never got a chance? What a bestial view so lacking in compassion!
Thankfully, these untruths were not the end. Your articles and book, and those of my non-reformed brothers and sisters, together with a re-reading of the Bible I was dragged out of the mire Calvinist doctrine had enveloped me. I thank you. How people can read the word and not see so clearly throughout it that God is tragically, shockingly, and with eternal consequences resisted by people throughout human history, is the greatest tragedy imaginable, but one that’s self evident. How anybody can think God gains glory from pre-destining souls to hell to my mind is perverted and clearly false proven by scripture and the revelation of Jesus, and how anybody can twist John 3:16 is beyond me. I could go on. I’ll close by saying that yes we do need more people like yourself to rise up and defend God’s character, we need a new Wesley and more! For the truth is that in the internet age intelligent charismatic preachers will get hear’d and young minds will be influenced, for bad, but also for good.
For any Calvinist reading this I hope I don’t upset you, and I know that John Piper is a much better, smarter man than myself, as are likely most Calvinists, who I see as my spiritual family. But Calvinism does so much damage outside of the inclusive white educated middle class American clique, more and more non Christians are hearing Calvinist ideology and are believing God hates them, and are in turn moving further away from the gospel. This can’t go on, like Wesley said it’s God’s character at stake here. God bless you all.
