Inconsistency

Calvinism and the God-as-Author Analogy

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Calvinism and the God-as-author analogy written by Roger E Olson, PhD One of my faithful visitors here pointed me to the following recent essay posted to the Desiring God blog by one Joe Rigney (professor…

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Contradiction Alert: Calvinist Scholar John Feinberg on Ethics

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One of our members, named Robert, recently made some comments in our private discussion group about an interview that Justin Taylor did with Calvinist scholar John Feinberg, pointing out how they contradict Calvinist doctrine and draw on Arminian doctrine when they talk about ethics. His comments have been edited a little and pasted in below:

I listened to Justin Taylor’s recently posted interview with John Feinberg and heard some real contradictions between Feinberg’s views in the area of ethics and his views on compatibilism/soft determinism.

To set the stage, John Feinberg is a Calvinist who calls himself a
soft determinist/compatibilist and he presented the Calvinist view in
the famous PREDESTINATION & FREE WILL: FOUR VIEWS OF DIVINE
SOVEREIGNTY & HUMAN FREEDOM (other contributors included Pinnock,

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The Westminster Confession of Faith: Handwaving

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Randolph Sinks Foster, in his book, Objections to Calvinism (1852) writes:

[The Confession of Faith states,] “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; [and now your disclaimer,] yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creature.”

But this disclaimer [God is not the author of sin] by no means relieves my embarrassment — it greatly increases it, by placing you [Calvinist brother] in the attitude, to my mind, of believing a palpable contradiction, namely, that God did cause all things, sin included, yet in such a way that he did not cause sin.”

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CALVINIST RHETORIC: Consistency

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Or “Van Til It Hurts”

What I Mean By Consistency

In the 1920s a Dutch Theologian by the name of Cornelius Van Til (hence the joke in the subtitle) revitalized an apologetic approach known as presuppositional apologetics. In essence, presuppositional apologetics assesses the validity of a philosophical view by its presuppositions (the underlying assumptions upon which the view is based) and whether these presuppositions contradict each other or are consistent with each other.* It is sort of like a monological Socratic argument.

Oh, and Van Til was a Calvinist.

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