Comments on: Seven Point Calvinism

By: New Blog Platform

New Blog Platform — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 07:16:15 +0000

[...] Seven Point Calvinism – not many people blogging about this, so I come near the top of the google hit [...]

By: cndo

cndo — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 17:16:13 +0000

“If I walk through a subway in London and I see five homeless people, and I give £10 to one of them, I have chosen to show kindness to that one person. But have I chosen to reject the other four?”

As a classic Arminian, I believe that God is omnipotent, ‘mighty to save’. Jesus said when he ascended he would draw everyone to himself, and Paul declared that the grace of God, ‘that brings salvation’, has appeared to everyone. Is your God skint, Mark?!

By: skullkrusher

skullkrusher — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Regarding your statement that all of the five points are not equally critical, I would suggest that eash is only a perspective on one point — God saves sinners. Each of the five points is merely a viewpoint on this basic issue.

By: Jason Schrock

Jason Schrock — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:14:34 +0000

Hi, I know I’m coming to this late. But I was on 7-pointing, and you came up first on google.

I think the relevant point in the best-possible-world question is in your definition of “world”. If you define “world” (kosmon, in greek) as “all there is, physical, spiritual, and so on, in all time” which I strongly believe to be the biblical view of the word, then you cannot distinguish the future heaven and earth from the present, fallen state of the kosmon from the future glorification as a different “possible world”. One comes, chronologically, before the other, and they both exist within God’s created order. Therefore, a World in which man was created, then fell and some were/are redeemed to the glory of God, and then later the judgment (“final shakedown”) occurs to the glorification of some and pain of others, is certainly the best possible world, for God would not (and clearly does not!) have it any other way.

By: Mark Heath

Mark Heath — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:24:52 +0000

Hi Collin,
Thanks for the comments. I guess the issue I have with going too far down the “best of all possible worlds” line, is that it could lead to fatalism. We’re supposed to be outraged at the presence of evil & suffering in the world, and long for it to be gone. Glibly declaring this to be the “best possible world” is open to very serious misunderstanding. I believe the new heavens and the new earth will rightly be called the “best possible world”. But of course, yes, I do believe that God is working all things for his glory, even the things we do not understand.

By: Collin Kotlarz

Collin Kotlarz — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 10:20:45 +0000

Mark-

I dug the analogy for double predestination. well put. You are making the best of all worlds theory a little bit too complicated with all the blue hair talk. All it means is God is working all things for his maximum glory. Heaven, Hell, your breakfast tommorow, are all being sovereignly orchestrated by God for his maximum glory. It’s the best world because God is about his glory and is going to maximize it.

By: Graeme Mallett

Graeme Mallett — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:35:08 +0000

2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of two.

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 12:29:33 +0000

Most people do have answers to exactly those kinds of questions.

A possible world is generally taken to be any consistent and complete set of propositions. There would be a world that’s intrinsically just like this one but you or your counterpart (philosophers disagree on whether you can be in other possible worlds) has blue hair. There is virtually no disagreement on this issue (only on whether it’s really you).

2+2=5 is logically impossible, so no possible world would have that. Almost no philosophers have disagreed with this. Descartes is probably the only major exception, and everyone else just thought he was nuts to suggest that 2+2 could have been 5.

My co-blogger Wink thinks God could have made atonement another way, but I’m with you on this. I think scripture is clear on that.

Romans 9 shows that Paul struggled with 4, but he seems content to assume that God knows what he’s doing, which suggests that he believes 3 really is better than 4. I don’t know of any scripture dealing with 1, but the same remarks by Paul might be extended to that.

By: Mark Heath

Mark Heath — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:56:48 +0000

Discussing ‘possible worlds’ is a bit out of my philosophical depth. Is there just one possible world, or a finite number, or a countably infinite number or an uncountably infinite number? Is there a world identical to this one but where I have blue hair? Could there be one where 2+2=5? Piper’s 7th point raises these types of question for which most people have no answer.

But we could easily think of four possible worlds:
1. There is no fall and no atonement necessary.
2. There is a fall, but everyone is condemned. No atonement takes place.
3. There is a fall, atonement is made by Jesus, but only some are saved.
4. There is a fall, atonement is made by Jesus, and all are saved.

Christians often ponder why options 1 and 4 didn’t turn out to be “best”, but comfort themselves that 3 seems better than 2.

While on the subject of possible worlds, Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane probably consitutes biblical proof that there was no possible world in which atonement for sin was made without the death of the Son of God.

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 01:32:24 +0000

Some people, predominantly Arminians, use the term ‘double predestination’ differently, to refer to something that most Calvinists believe to be heresy. I don’t remember offhand what that is, but it came up in the early Calvinist-Arminian debates. In modern times, there’s still a division between those who think God predestined both groups in exactly the same way, which I think I explain in a comment at the post by Wink why that is unlikely given Paul’s grammar in Romans 9. As you say, denying those things doesn’t mean there isn’t some sense in which God’s choice guarantees the damnation of all not chosen, which is indeed entailed by the five points of Calvinism. No one can accept the five points without accepting the sixth one at least in that sense.

As for the seventh, that’s got a rich tradition. Gottfried Leibniz famously made the claim, and Candide ridiculed him for it, but it basically showed how drastically Candide had misunderstood what Leibniz meant. The Jansenists Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche (the Jansenists were an Augustinian Catholic order that Blaise Pascal was also part of) both dialogued with Leibniz on the matter and concluded that his views weren’t as extreme as they had thought. I think any reasonable reader will conclude that Leibniz is right in the Augustinian tradition.

You’re right that scripture doesn’t flat-out say that God’s actual plan of salvation in this history makes for the most complete and perfect way God could have done things, but people like Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards (where Piper really gets it from) who say this sort of thing consider it basically a logical implication of God’s goodness together with God’s omnipotence the same way most Calvinists think of the moderate double predestination view as an immediate implication of the five points.