Calvinist conundrum!

[Contarini]

Why is it that Puritans (and oftentimes Calvinists in general) are stereotyped as being overly abstemious, prudish, etc.? I never understood this, considering their sola fide Reformation heritage.

First of all, you may be falling into some false assumptions about what “sola fide” implies for the moral life. In its Calvinist form, at least, sola fide typically leads to greater anxiety about good works than is present in Catholicism. And this is true in many forms of evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicals are typically more worried about the implications of immoral behavior, because it says something about a person’s long-term, perhaps permanent spiritual state, whereas for Catholics and Orthodox forgiveness of sin is always one confession away. Calvinists are particularly prone to this kind of worry about moral behavior, because of their beliefs about predestination and perseverance. (Note: There are Protestants who interpret sola fide to justify moral laxity, and there are some evangelicals who combine the worst of both worlds, being lax on their own immoralities while condemning the “wrong” kinds of sin–like homosexuality–as signs of someone’s unregenerate state.)

On the other hand, the common way the word “puritan” or “puritanical” is used has very little to do with the original Puritans and a lot more to do with Victorian Evangelicals who claimed spiritual descent from the Puritans, leading to their more liberal contemporaries using the term “puritan” to describe peculiarly Victorian forms of moral concern.

Edwin

 

[jwright82]

Actually, I think that’s the section he was teaching on that day. I think he’s really Reformed at heart, but just a big fan of Luther …

I am a big fan of his and Lutheran theology in general.

 

[Cat_Herder]

Well presupossitionalism utilizes a particuler form of philosophical argumentation called a transcendental argument. So in a sense yes we assume God to exist and the bible to be His Word, but we maintain that this is the only truly or completly rational assumption to have.

The rest of us say that there are NO rational assumptions; an assumption by definition is not rational. An assumption is a crutch you bring in when there is no rational data or inferences available. God deserves better than that; in fact God expects us to look at what He has created in order to learn about Him. Romans 1:20.

There was a Catholic apologest who was on Catholic Answers some time ago, I can’t remember when, who wrote a book against the new atheism that was done more or less in a presupossitional style. The whole argument from ethics is essentially presupossitional, without we have no reason to beleive that right and wrong exist. I hope that makes a little more sense.

The Universe is finely tuned to support life; this evidences both the existence of the Designer and the fact that the Designer values life. Ethics follows.

Isn’t that better than just assuming that God and ethics exist?

 

[fons_vitae]

First of all, you may be falling into some false assumptions about what “sola fide” implies for the moral life. In its Calvinist form, at least, sola fide typically leads to greater anxiety about good works than is present in Catholicism. And this is true in many forms of evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicals are typically more worried about the implications of immoral behavior, because it says something about a person’s long-term, perhaps permanent spiritual state, whereas for Catholics and Orthodox forgiveness of sin is always one confession away. Calvinists are particularly prone to this kind of worry about moral behavior, because of their beliefs about predestination and perseverance. (Note: There are Protestants who interpret sola fide to justify moral laxity, and there are some evangelicals who combine the worst of both worlds, being lax on their own immoralities while condemning the “wrong” kinds of sin–like homosexuality–as signs of someone’s unregenerate state.)

Ahhh, there we go! So instead of worrying about being gradually hardened to sin over time, a particularly big mess-up could be a sign of you already being hardened by God. Interesting.

 

[Augsburg1530]

Ahhh, there we go! So instead of worrying about being gradually hardened to sin over time, a particularly big mess-up could be a sign of you already being hardened by God. Interesting.

This is amplified when you take the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement into consideration. Since there is no objective way to know that Christ has died for you, you must rely on your own personal morality in order to gain some substantive knowledge of your spiritual condition and, hence, whether you’re forgiven in the eyes of God.

 

[1sicht]

OP, for starters, there were 2 types of Puritans (broadly speaking), one which did not totally oppose the State-run church in England, the other totally opposed and censorious of it. The latter were much more astringent in their whole approach to any kind of “pleasure” or “worldly” pursuits. Even today, you’ll find Calvinists who think that dancing (as long as it’s something like folk or ballroom) is fine, and others who condemn any kind of dancing across the board. The Leftist media likes to focus exclusively on the legalistic type of Puritans, but they weren’t the only types out there. (For example, I attended a Calvinistic church [the Puritans were broadly speaking Calvinist] for several years, where the young pastor and his equally young minion elders almost made a fetish out of their cigar-smoking get togethers.)

 

[jwright82]

The rest of us say that there are NO rational assumptions; an assumption by definition is not rational. An assumption is a crutch you bring in when there is no rational data or inferences available. God deserves better than that; in fact God expects us to look at what He has created in order to learn about Him. Romans 1:20.

Well first off we all make assumptions. You assume your the same from moment to moment without any one having to offer some kind of absolute proof for that. Many of the most irritating problems in philosophy seem to have no other resolution than common sense, and a paradigm case argument but that is something else. So for someone to say that they come into the discussion with no assumptions is not being entierly self-consistant, not that I am calling you a liar or anything only that you hold assumptions without being self-conscience.

For instance you hold assumptions regarding the correct manner of a rational defence. That one is holding on to a "crutch" if one has an assumption. If I were to ask you why reason demands this I would bet you would only reveal your own assumptions about reason itself. Reason is a God given tool that we posess to make sense out of the world around us in all of its creational splender, not an end in and of itself. But a tool has no ultimate authority like most people think about reason as some kind of ultimate authority, but reason like everything else gains whatever authority it has from God.

Now I am not advocating a Gordon Clark type presupositionalism here. Your criticism is very well directed towards him, he beleived that we have a set of assumptions or axioms that we then work all truth from like in Euclidian geomotry. I follow Van Til who taught that a presuposition can come from many different sources and can be formed from many different reasons. So they are not a foundationalist type system, they are a system of beleifs held by each and every individual. What counts as a presuposition are our most important and fundemental beleifs, our existance, God’s existance, morality, what the world is, etc. We may come to hold these beleifs for a variety of reasons but they tend to dtermine how we see the world around us, a worldview.

Other beleifs like “it will rain today” are not as important and can be disproven, by it not raining, without it affecting any of our other beleifs. So there is a sort of theory meets practice thing here, we look at an ideal worldview, like atheism, and a particuler atheist’s worldview and mesh them together and through logical analysis we show that there worldview cannot make sense out of reality as we experience it. We then seek to show that only the Christian worldview can make sense out of reality as we experience it. That is in a very brief form the from of a transcendental argument.

The Universe is finely tuned to support life; this evidences both the existence of the Designer and the fact that the Designer values life. Ethics follows.

Isn’t that better than just assuming that God and ethics exist?

Well the matter of ethics is this. We all experience right and wrong. Even the hardend evil person will feel from time to time as if someone violated some sort of grand ethical code or their rights or whatever. But is anything right or wrong? Western Philosophy, and Eastern, have failed to date to produce one universal moral code that is beyond doubt. So they cannot give a satisfactory reason to the question why something is right or wrong? They may plead but everyone thinks or knows that such and such is wrong, but I refuse to grant them that sort of nuetrality in the apologetical engagment. If they wish to say criticize Christian morality as being morally wrong than they must produce this grand morality to sort of back their argument up. No sufficient moral code, no argument. 

As far as your argument goes I agree but I think it is very very hard to prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is very good evidence but maybe not an absolute proof. I prefer to use a metod uterly devistates anyone who would deny Christian theism to be the one true worldview, in the most loving way possible so don't get me wrong here.

 

[mackbrislawn]

This is amplified when you take the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement into consideration. Since there is no objective way to know that Christ has died for you, you must rely on your own personal morality in order to gain some substantive knowledge of your spiritual condition and, hence, whether you’re forgiven in the eyes of God.

A Protestant complaint about Catholicism is that a Catholic never knew whether he had done enough to be saved. But it seems in this manner the Protestant has jumped from the frying pan into the fire, because to gain knowledge of your spiritual condition you have to frantically go about doing good works and being moral in order to give evidence to yourself you are forgiven!

Talk about anxiety.

 

[Augsburg1530]

A Protestant complaint about Catholicism is that a Catholic never knew whether he had done enough to be saved. But it seems in this manner the Protestant has jumped from the frying pan into the fire, because to gain knowledge of your spiritual condition you have to frantically go about doing good works and being moral in order to give evidence to yourself you are forgiven!

Talk about anxiety.

Absolutely. In many ways, it’s a hundred times worse. Granted, there are probably many Calvinists who don’t deal with issues of moral anxiety, but that may be due to self-delusion more than anything else. After all, when your certainty comes from within, you’re either going to think you’re actually pulling the commandments off, or you’ll sink into depression when you realize how dark your heart really is. Pharisee or depressed. Not good options.

 

[jwright82]

I would say following Calvin and Luther that the certianty comes soly from the promises of God. That is all, the morbid introspection is an unfortuanant side affect of being human, not Reformed. God made promises and that is enough for me. I now am expecting to live a life in obediance to Christ for what He has done for me. So Lutherans, Reformed, Orthodox, and Catholic all agree that being a Christian has moral demands on the life of the beleiver, so much for easy-beleivism (which rubs us the wrong way just as much as it does Catholicism and Orthodoxy).

 

[mark_a]

So what a husband and wife decide to do in their own privacy is largley, though not completly, relegated to what the Westminster Confession of Faith regards as the liberty of conscience, God alone in our opinion is the Lord of conscience and he will convict his people as he sees fit. Now this does not mean that anything goes only that there is a whole lot of private things that God deals with privatly, if that makes sense. I mean the Catholic Church also leaves these sorts of things, in general, to private discression right, from what I have gathered?

Are you trying to turn this into a contraception thread?

 

[jwright82]

Are you trying to turn this into a contraception thread?

No, not at all. I am Protestant in that reagard, and I didn’t join this site to really stir up any hornants nests or anything. Actually there I was refering to the “deed” that marraied people do from time to time…I think you know what I am refering to . In this context though, we don’t really know what the Puritians thought sex because they didn’t talk about it. They were very “fruitful” and multiplied so we know that they knew about it. They had much more to say about love and so the article I read tried to pull off that aspect of their thinking in regards to sex.

That part of our confession would be similer to any area of life that the Catholic church hasn’t made any specific moral judgements about, in that sense we have the same thing. This just has to do with issues like drinking, not getting drunk, or smokink or the like. God alone is Lord of Conscience and He will convict his people where He sees fit in their lives.

 

[fons_vitae]

You know, I’m still not clear what makes Reformed Epistemology unique when compared with general Christian thought. Of course we need basic assumptions about reason and so forth… that sounds like my arguments with my rather postmodern Tech. Comm. teacher. I just categorize these assumptions under natural law more than anything else–something that’s stamped upon the human heart by God.

 

[fons_vitae]

@jwright82:
I apologize if it seems like we’re piling onto you. I just noticed how many replies are piling up…

 

[jwright82]

You know, I’m still not clear what makes Reformed Epistemology unique when compared with general Christian thought. Of course we need basic assumptions about reason and so forth… that sounds like my arguments with my rather postmodern Tech. Comm. teacher. I just categorize these assumptions under natural law more than anything else–something that’s stamped upon the human heart by God.

Well they go like this. In classical apologetics the burden of proof is on the theist to prove that God exists etc. There is nothing wrong with that aproech only that there could be other aproechs. The Reformed Epistomologist points to the fact that many people hold many different basic beleifs without any serious philosophical argument to presuade them. For instance philosophy has never really produced proof that we exist or other people exist and things like that, but we all go on beleiving them anyway. So imagine that someone were to tell you that you don’t exist. Since you have to exist in some respect to debate with him or her they would have a pretty big burden of proof to convince you that you do not exist.

All RE does is argue that beleif in God is one of these basic beleifs and therefore the burden is on the atheist to prove that yours and mine beleif in God is somehow irrational. This aproech works as far as it goes but I have discovered that the deeper into philosophy you go the basic beleif idea breaks down. So it works with everyday common beleifs but not so well with like moral beleifs or something like that. A person could claim that it is a basic beleif of theirs that God doesn’t exist so now we have to prove that they are wrong or something like that. I have not studied Alvin Plantinga on this like I should so, it works in certian scenerios and not in others.

 

[jwright82]

@jwright82:
I apologize if it seems like we’re piling onto you. I just noticed how many replies are piling up…

Not at all . I am happy to help where I can and happy to learn where I can. Unlike many Reformed people I think that Catholics and Orthodox beleivers are Christian. I may disagree theologically with certian elements but I think we will be in Paradise one day.

 

[Augsburg1530]

I would say following Calvin and Luther that the certianty comes soly from the promises of God. That is all, the morbid introspection is an unfortuanant side affect of being human, not Reformed. God made promises and that is enough for me. I now am expecting to live a life in obediance to Christ for what He has done for me. So Lutherans, Reformed, Orthodox, and Catholic all agree that being a Christian has moral demands on the life of the beleiver, so much for easy-beleivism (which rubs us the wrong way just as much as it does Catholicism and Orthodoxy).

As opposed to hard believism LoL

You are correct that it is human nature to be introspective about our standing before God. That is because we are wired for Law. However, Christianity - the Gospel, is all about taking us out of our introspection and looking to the external cross as our only means of assurance of our standing before God. But what happens when the idea is introduced that it may not apply to you?

 

[Cat_Herder]

Well they go like this. In classical apologetics the burden of proof is on the theist to prove that God exists etc. There is nothing wrong with that aproech only that there could be other aproechs. The Reformed Epistomologist points to the fact that many people hold many different basic beleifs without any serious philosophical argument to presuade them. For instance philosophy has never really produced proof that we exist or other people exist and things like that, but we all go on beleiving them anyway. So imagine that someone were to tell you that you don’t exist. Since you have to exist in some respect to debate with him or her they would have a pretty big burden of proof to convince you that you do not exist.

Two words: Anthropic principle.

All RE does is argue that beleif in God is one of these basic beleifs and therefore the burden is on the atheist to prove that yours and mine beleif in God is somehow irrational.

In other words, it is not an epistemology but rather a shifting of the burden of proof. Shifting the burden to the adversary only works if the adversary cannot meet the burden.

Hence it is not a defense against the atheist who comes toting not only Darwin’s Origin of Species but also a method stolen from Father Bacon, a theory stolen from Father Lemaitre and a razor stolen from Brother Occam. With these illicitly gained tools, the atheist can easily meet the burden you set upon him. If all you have done to defend God is hand the burden of proof over to your opponent, then you are a sitting duck, like a Calvinism-raised Evangelical college freshman facing down an atheist professor in Humanities or Biology 1301.

Hence you must fight back with evidence for God. This is something that Calvinist-derived epistemologies cannot do—because the evidence is Catholic, as are all the power tools that the atheist stole. Those theories and arguments were meant to argue FOR the existence of God, not against; but Calvinists cannot use them without admitting the authority of the Catholic toolsmiths, rebooting their hermeneutics of biblical interpretation, and otherwise ceasing to be Calvinist.

This is harsh, but I have to say it: the sooner we retire Calvinism, the easier it will be to get rid of atheism (and its associated evils, such as communism and abortion) and the faster that process will be.

This aproech works as far as it goes but I have discovered that the deeper into philosophy you go the basic beleif idea breaks down. So it works with everyday common beleifs but not so well with like moral beleifs or something like that.

I addressed this a few posts back. The response is teleology, which proves the value of life; all morality then follows, being nothing but priniciples to defend the sanctity of life.

 

[jwright82]

As opposed to hard believism LoL

You are correct that it is human nature to be introspective about our standing before God. That is because we are wired for Law. However, Christianity - the Gospel, is all about taking us out of our introspection and looking to the external cross as our only means of assurance of our standing before God. But what happens when the idea is introduced that it may not apply to you?

If you are refering to election, than I would point out that the Formula of Concord offers a very strong view of divine election, save double predestination. On the other hand we Reformed recognize the proper place of election withen the Covenant of Grace, made with Abraham and fullfiled in Christ. God elected, predestined, redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and will glorify His people (Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Orthodox, and Prtoastant included with Reformed). This election is assured by resting on the promises of God, a very Lutheran idea. If I look to myself to see what in me makes me a person of God than I risk losing sight of what matters God has promised me that and in Faith I trust those promises. Also in faith I seek to live a life God pleasing with the grace and strngth of the Holy Spirit.

The recent anti-confessional reformed movement known as Federal Vision made similer claims to a morbid introspection among Reformed people. I personaly don’t know what they are talking about but I can understand their concern. I hope that answers your question and I hope it is not a round about answer but I just wanted to locate election in its proper place in Reformed theology.

 

[jwright82]

In other words, it is not an epistemology but rather a shifting of the burden of proof. Shifting the burden to the adversary only works if the adversary cannot meet the burden.

Hence it is not a defense against the atheist who comes toting not only Darwin’s Origin of Species but also a method stolen from Father Bacon, a theory stolen from Father Lemaitre and a razor stolen from Brother Occam. With these illicitly gained tools, the atheist can easily meet the burden you set upon him. If all you have done to defend God is hand the burden of proof over to your opponent, then you are a sitting duck, like a Calvinism-raised Evangelical college freshman facing down an atheist professor in Humanities or Biology 1301.

Hence you must fight back with evidence for God. This is something that Calvinist-derived epistemologies cannot do—because the evidence is Catholic, as are all the power tools that the atheist stole. Those theories and arguments were meant to argue FOR the existence of God, not against; but Calvinists cannot use them without admitting the authority of the Catholic toolsmiths, rebooting their hermeneutics of biblical interpretation, and otherwise ceasing to be Calvinist.

This is harsh, but I have to say it: the sooner we retire Calvinism, the easier it will be to get rid of atheism (and its associated evils, such as communism and abortion) and the faster that process will be.

I addressed this a few posts back. The response is teleology, which proves the value of life; all morality then follows, being nothing but priniciples to defend the sanctity of life.

Well first off it is epistomological in the sense that it seeks to answer questions that contemporary philosophers are asking about knowledge, beleifs, and justification in beleifs. Plantinga in particuler explores the concept of warrant. In other words when is someone warranted to hold to a belief, whether we know if it is true or not? That is that someone could every reason to beleive something even if we find out later that the beleif is wrong. This technicaly can establish burdens or proof with regards to certian basic beleifs, Plantinga then argues that beleif in God is one of these basic beleifs. Like I said I don’t completly follow him, I like some of his stuff but I prefer Van Til to anyone.

Also no one is discounting the use of evidence or argument, just exploring other facets to the question of Apologetics and seeking new answers to old questions. In my 11 years of practicing Apologetics in an ametuer sense I have never seen a better method than Presupositionalism, it destroys the very foundations the Atheist would even seek to make an argument on. We argue that their worldview cannot even explain and justify the existance of reason itself.

Also I think it a little unfair to blame “Calvinism” for the enduring problem of atheism, such a claim is on the side of impossible to prove, since no atheist has ever to my knowledge mounted a credible defense against the presupositional argument. In fact I say that Catholics and Reformed can at least Platonicaly agree to fight all unbeleif with loving care and rational reflection, your method being different from mine. It will be hard to “retire” Calvinism because like Catholics, Lutherans, and unlike the average Evangelacal we tend to be pretty educated. We are not Fundementalist so we don’t fall prey to their problems.