Did You Catch the Calvinist Contradiction Alert?

Recently, we posted an analysis by one of our members (Robert) of a portion of Justin Taylor’s interview of Calvinist scholar, John Feinberg, about his book Ethics for a Brave New World. In that analysis, Robert showed that Feinberg (and seemingly Taylor along with him) actually contradicts his own Calvinistic view of freedom and relies on the Arminian view of freedom to ground moral responsibility. Robert left a comment about the matter at Taylor’s posting of the interview, but there has been no explanation of this contradiction. I just wanted to highlight this development because it seems that there is no real answer that can be given to Robert’s observations. (But perhaps we will eventually hear a confession that they misspoke or were just wrong in what they said.) One of Calvinism’s foremost modern ethicists, and seemingly with him, one of the Calvinist resurgence’s leading figures, rely on the Arminian conception of free will to ground moral accountability in apparently unwitting contradiction to Calvinism. That’s because the Arminian view is the biblical view while Calvinism does not comport with Scripture and is difficult to live out consistently because it does not successfully provide for human free will as it is found in Scripture or moral accountability.