I’ve watched a lot of material by James White, and an argument that he often uses is to label the gospel messages of people who disagree with his Calvinism as “man-centered.” The most recent time I’ve heard of this was against William Lane Craig’s molinism, because in molinism, the focus of God is on the salvation of as many souls as possible, and on Calvinism, the focus of God is on glorifying Himself by choosing to save the people that He does. What would be your response?
My response would be that Calvinism is utterly Pelagian because Calvinism is a completely works-based (and thus man-centered) Gospel. How can I say this? Here’s why.
In the Protestant/Calvinist world view, Adam was originally supposed to work his way into heaven by
his own human abilities. This is works-salvation by definition. Since Adam fell, he obviously failed that task, but with his sin/guilt imputed to us (the unbilblical Protestant way of putting it) it made it impossible for each of us to work our way into heaven. In the Protestant mind, there’s nothing wrong with man working his way into heaven by his own human abilities (in fact they say that’s the only way to heaven), the **only **problem they have is sinful man trying to do that.
The Protestant-Calvinist “solution” to the problem of
man needing perfect human obedience is that Jesus came and performed that perfect human obedience for us, and this perfect human obedience was “imputed” to our record. So when God looks at the believer with Christ’s perfect obedience imputed to them, God sees that sinner as if the sinner lived a perfectly obedient life. This is the Calvinist “Gospel,” and it’s heresy for various reasons, especially because strips Our Lord of His Divinity (making His Divinity unnecessary since only human obedience was needed).
Unknown to most Protestants, that view of salvation is textbook Pelagianism, i.e. doing works pleasing to God by our own natural human abilities and receiving a super-natural reward for doing so. The only alternative is the Biblical-Catholic view of man cooperating with God’s grace, which Calvinists try to bash by calling it “synergism”.
In the Biblical-Catholic view, man isn’t saved by working his way to a record of perfect human obedience, but rather man is saved by being in relationship with the Trinity, particularly by receiving the Indwelling of the Trinity in his soul. And because of this, all the believer’s actions are cooperating with grace every step of the way, growing that relationship with God. Jesus being Divine and human was the epitome of this “synergism”. Jesus
never did any good works that were purely human acts, every good work was in conjunction with the divine.
And that’s where the Calvinist is trapped. If they say Jesus loved God and neighbor perfectly by human ability alone apart from grace, then they’ve fallen into Arianism-Nestorianism by stripping Jesus of His Divine Personhood and Divine Nature. But if they say Jesus loved God and neighbor perfectly through cooperating with grace, then the Calvinist must admit “synergism” isn’t a bad word after all but is in fact the only orthodox position. And if Adam was to be originally capable of this as well, then Adam also had to have had cooperated with grace from day one.
In summary: The Catholic (Biblical) view of salvation is that man is saved by being in relationship with the Trinity. In the Calvinist (Pelagian) view man is saved by passing an endurance test of purely human achievement. In the Calvinist (Pelagian) view, intimate communion with God is an
afterthought. The moment the Calvinist adds Divine Indwelling into their equation, they lose any grounds to criticize synergism.
