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WesleyF
Guest
What do Calvinists believe about God’s love? Does he love everyone or only the elect?
Do Calvinists believe that God loves everyone? Or does he love only the elect?
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kra130
Guest
I am a Calvinists and he loves everyone.
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Tietjen
Guest
Interesting question… I’ve talked to a few Calvinists and have been confused by the concept of how on one hand they will say that He loves everyone, and on the other hand will say that He created some for Hell. Never really understood this.
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kra130
Guest
He loves everyone Paul best states it in Romans 9 and i find it to be helpful in understanding the Calvinistic view that God created some people to be vessels of wrath.
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JustaServant
Guest
From my experience walking among Calvinists briefly, the elect.
The tragedy of Calvinism, and to a lesser extent fundamentalism, is their rejection of a God of love. The God of many Calvinists HATES. He is a cold God who delights in sending people to Hell and punishing sinners.
To many of the Calvinists I encountered, God is the unapproachable Deity who has a cold “relationship” with His creatures. I met many a Reformed preacher who feared calling God “Abba” as Paul did. They delight in talking about the “God of hate”. One Calvinist said to me once: “I wish I could learn to hate as God hates”.
I am not saying ALL Calvinists are like this.
The reason I did not spend a long time among the Calvinists is because I clung to the God of love. This was the God I knew from my youth. The God the Catholic Church taught me to know. I suppose I still retained more things the nuns taught me than I realized.
When confronted with the cold religion of Calvinism, I retreated into the arms of the God I knew from my youth.
God’s love is not human love. Human love is based on feelings and rooted in emotions. God’s is a love that operates apart from emotions. His love does not waver day by day. It is the total commitment of His Being to seek our highest and best, and to bring us to our fullest potential as humans.
He is Love, and He loves us because of who He is, not because of who we are.
He does not love what we do, but He is committed to us, pursuing us down every blind alley and path of foolishness. He will not let us go. His is a love that is not looking for what it can get out of us, but a committed love that searches for opportunities to give to us.
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JustaServant
Guest
God’s omniscience is one of His attributes. It is indeed true that God knows who will go to heaven and who will not. God’s omniscience does not interfere with human free will to choose. God knows what our ultimate choice for heaven or hell will be but he does not determine that choice. Our choices are our own.
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JRRTFAN
Guest
If he loves everyone and, as Scripture says, desires the salvation of all, why does he create some people without the free will to gain heaven? That is, why does He specifically create some people to be damned and not ake everyone elect (under Calvinist teaching)? How can he desire something that is not possible?
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onemangang
Guest
I think it is hard to ask the question Do Calvinist believe that God Loves everyone? First you are forced to define “What is a Calvinist?” There are many types that claim John Calvin, that do not believe as John Calvin taught. You have your Supralapsarian Calvinist, your Infralapsarian Calvinist, Hyper Calvinist, Moderate Calvinist, all sorts of people that use the name Calvin. Some prefer to not use the term Calvinist at all, and just use a term like Monergism, or Puritan, or Reformed. So to better understand what is being asked you may want to further define what type of Calvinist. You have people that call themselves Calvinist with many different views of Theology. Guy’s like Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church would fall under the umbrella of “Calvinism”, but so would R.C Sproul, Paul Washer, John MacArthur, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Alistair Begg and a host of others. You have many people that will call themselves 4 point Calvinist, so hard to tell really what a Calvinist is?
If we are to just limit a Calvinist to the Acronym TULIP, we would still have many views to how that works out.
Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Grace
Perseverance of the saints
R.C Sproul gives a quick overview of a Calvinist view of Justification on youtube that may help in understanding how the TULIP Acronym would play out! youtu.be/IapqqQ45Q4w
I think that if you hold to the Reformed view of Justification “Grace alone, Faith Alone, Christ Alone” whereas you except that Christ righteousness is imputed into the sinner, whereas the sinner is now declared Just by God, you, logically must be a Calvinist. I have run across countless Protestants that say they are Imputed Christ Righteousness and** Declared Just** yet do NOT follow that to it’s logical conclusion. They will still insist that you must make a free will decision to receive the Imputation of Christ and yet, you can lose your salvation?
If we are to just limit a Calvinist to the Acronym TULIP, we would still have many views to how that works out.
Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Grace
Perseverance of the saints
R.C Sproul gives a quick overview of a Calvinist view of Justification on youtube that may help in understanding how the TULIP Acronym would play out! youtu.be/IapqqQ45Q4w
I think that if you hold to the Reformed view of Justification “Grace alone, Faith Alone, Christ Alone” whereas you except that Christ righteousness is imputed into the sinner, whereas the sinner is now declared Just by God, you, logically must be a Calvinist. I have run across countless Protestants that say they are Imputed Christ Righteousness and** Declared Just** yet do NOT follow that to it’s logical conclusion. They will still insist that you must make a free will decision to receive the Imputation of Christ and yet, you can lose your salvation?
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kra130
Guest
Let me ask this, where in the Bible is the term free will ever used? I’ll help you out it’s not. the term election and predestined is used a lot. Also if Adam the perfect man could not choose God what hope do we have to choose God. it says in Romans 3:10-11 that no one is righteous no seeks for God. So our free will will always choose not God Jonathan Edwards calls it a divine and supernatural light shines into the heart of the man and they have no choice but to accept God. God is love but at the same time God is holy and just and is angry about the unholiness and injustice of this world. So he has created vessels of wrath in order to show his glory and power to the whole world. if you look throughout the history of the Bible election is ever prevalant “Jacob i loved Esau i hated” “God hardened Pharohs heart” Pauls conversion. time and time again you see people that have no choice.
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onemangang
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Where in the bible is Trinity used, Sola Scriptura used, I’ll help you out. It’s NOT.
Calvinism uses a Penal Substitution of Justification. So God is mad and angry with sin, so he sends his Son into the world to Cover men with some sort of Cloak of Righteousness, so now it is Christ righteousness that covers you, so God only sees Christ and not the sinner. Now God is no longer angry with man! Sounds like God got converted and not man to me!
You are somewhat correct in saying people have no choice! Apart from grace nobody can choose God, it is the Holy Spirit already working in you that moves you to Love God and Hate sin.
The root of Calvinist theology is Justification by Penal Substitution. Unheard of up until John Calvin came along BTW.
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JRRTFAN
Guest
No offense, but have you, uh, read the Bible? Do you want to start with free will and Eve/Adam, Cain/Abel, Noah’s nakedness/Noah’s son, Abraham/Hagar, Mary/Angel, Jesus Christ/no one takes my life I lay it down/ Peter/I do not know tha man, David?withdraw and leave Uriah, Uriah? shall I sleep in a house when…
Free will, in the Bible ~~~~Are you kidding me? You are, right? Sure, good joke! Hehehehe, good one! Now, let’s get serious about Calvin and BOLOGNA!
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jmoneyideas
Guest
I got into this with my ex pastor… He was all about double predestination. It got pretty heated and he is no longer a facebook friend of mine, his choice. There are other Calvinist that if you Youtube them for example John Macarthur in a Q&A forum looked lost when trying explain it to people. If God judged us and since he is all knowing , why send his son as a savior.
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Newsy
Guest
I have asked you this question on another thread, if we cannot resist God and are pre-destined to love Him, how is that love? Love that is not freely given, is no love at all. I know I love God, imperfectly, yet I still love Him. If I have no chance to change my mind or decide to love God then it is forced upon me, true love is never forced.
You were told to look at the entire passage in Romans 3, to see the context. You obviously are not seeing the context. Romans 3 goes on to say , “22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”. So, does this contradict your theory of total depravity? Does this contradict the idea that only some are chosen? I mean, it says all are justified, right?
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JustaServant
Guest
In my brief walk among reformed Calvinists I used to hear that bolded verse quoted quite often. The problem is that you are interpreting the verse through human, sinful eyes.
What God ‘hates’ are things that oppose His holiness. His ‘hate’ is not stained with sin. Human hate, is stained with sin because we are fallen creatures. To invoke God in our hatred is to find a ‘holy’ excuse for our sinful expression. God’s ‘hate’ works toward redemption, not destruction.
Human hate only wishes to divide, ridicule and destroy in an attempt to prove Genesis 3 correct: we can be as God.
As for your other points.
The Bible states that Christ died for all men. John 4:42 describes Christ as “the Savior of the world,” and 1 John 2:2 states that Christ “is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.” 1 Timothy 4:10 describes God as “the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe.” To split hairs, as many Calvinists do, and say “world” doesn’t really mean “world” is simply intellectual dishonesty.
In going to the cross, Christ intended to make salvation possible for all men, but he did not intend to make salvation actual for all men, otherwise we would have to say that Christ went to the cross intending that all men would end up in heaven. This is clearly not the case. God does desire the salvation of all men.
1 Timothy 2:4 states God "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
To claim God elects some people to salvation and others to damnation is simply not the God of the Bible, nor the God that I know.
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anodos
Guest
Wow, I feel that I’ve had a similar experience. Only recently did I become more open to the teaching that God is Love, and not until I found it in the catechism of a Church that I had begun to consider might be infallible. I spent years trying to decide what “love” meant, and trying to make it mean something hateful to fit my personal understanding of theology.
There are different versions of Calvinism, as smarter posters have already pointed out. The difficulty for me was that “soft-hearted” ones were not as logical as “hard-hearted” ones, so I gravitated toward the most depressing versions.
Some Calvinists (I’m thinking of Jonathan Edwards in his “Sermons”) appear to have put the non-elect in a total shadow. God hates them enormously, arbitrarily . God’s love toward the elect is likewise enormous and arbitrary.
Others (like Charles Ryrie, “Basic Theology”) stress that it is the God who IS LOVE that has predestined, and that He would not do anything contrary to love, and He never acts capriciously. God loves the non-elect.
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anodos
Guest
In this sense, would it be okay for someone to want to learn to “hate as God hates”?
From my perspective, it is a free will to** reject** salvation, not receive it. But that said, I’m just curious why you think that to believe one is imputed righteousness necessarily means that one gives up free will, and cannot reject grace.I think that if you hold to the Reformed view of Justification “Grace alone, Faith Alone, Christ Alone” whereas you except that Christ righteousness is imputed into the sinner, whereas the sinner is now declared Just by God, you, logically must be a Calvinist. I have run across countless Protestants that say they are Imputed Christ Righteousness and** Declared Just** yet do NOT follow that to it’s logical conclusion. They will still insist that you must make a free will decision to receive the Imputation of Christ and yet, you can lose your salvation?
Jon
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mini_me640
Guest
How can God be angry at the unholiness and injustice in the world if he created us with no choice in the matter, without free will? He should be angry with himself then.
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fhansen
Guest
Yes, He loves everyone but predestines some to eternal torment anyway.
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Loknar
Guest
Ugh that is horrible…I grew up Presbyterian, and we certainly never went THAT far! Wow.
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