Jerry Walls lectures on objections to Calvinism

WARNING: This lecture is a very sharp and pointed critique of Calvinist theology. Viewer discretion is advised. 

In Protestant Christianity, there is a division between people who accept Calvinist doctrines and those who don’t. Both groups think that the other group are genuine Christians, but the debate has more to do with the human free will, human responsibility and who God loves.

About Dr. Jerry Walls:

• BA in Religion and Philosophy, Houghton College
• MDiv, Princeton Seminary
• STM, Yale Divinity School
• PhD in Philosophy, Notre Dame

He is a professor at Houston Baptist University. You can find a more detailed profile here.

Dr. Walls is Protestant (like me). He is a substance dualist (like me). And he believes in a real eternal Hell (like me). And he is very, very assertive. Definitely no confidence problems here. And you’re not going to have a problem keeping your attention on this lecture!

Note that I do not agree with or endorse Dr. Walls on all of his views.

Here’s the lecture: (64 minutes)

The MP3 file is here.

Summary:

• What are the main doctrines of Calvinism? (TULIP)
• A look at the Westminster Confession
• The nature of freedom and free will
• Calvinist doctrine of freedom: compatibilism
• The implications of compatibilism
• Who determines what each person will desire on Calvinism?
• Who does God love on Calvinism?
• The law of non-contradiction
• Does God make a genuine offer of salvation to all people on Calvinism?
• Does God love “the elect” differently than the “non-elect” on Calvinism?

He quotes at least a half-dozen Calvinist theologians in this lecture, including John Piper, J.I. Packer and D.A. Carson. And he also mentions 3 videos at the end of the lecture where he goes over specific Bible verses that seem to support Calvinism (part 4, part 5, part 6 are the ones he mentioned).

This lecture is very strong stuff, and I think that he could have been nicer when presenting it, but he hit on every single objection that I have to Calvinism, and he worked through my reasoning too! So I really liked that he validated all of my concerns about Calvinism. I’m not as bothered about the problems with Calvinism as he is, though. I don’t think it’s a big divisive issue. I almost always read Calvinist theologians when I am reading theology. I just conjoin Calvinism with middle knowledge and resistible grace, and it’s fine. Calvinists are some of the best theologians, they are just wrong on the things he discusses in his lecture.

You may also be interested in these debates on salvation between a Calvinist and a non-Calvinist.

Filed under: Videos, Arminian, Arminianism, Calvinism, Christianity, Church, Contradiction, Determinism, Doctrine, Free Will, Freedom, Inconsistency, James White, Jerry Walls, John Calvin, John Piper, John Wesley, Logic, Love, Mystery, Paul Helm, Predestination, R.C. Sproul, Sovereignty, Theology, TULIP, Wesleyan, Westminster Confession

Mike Licona explains the As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Es of New Testament reliability

Mike Licona is one of my favorite Christian apologists, and here is an excellent lecture to show you why.

In the lecture, he explains why the four biographies in the New Testament should be accepted as historically accurate: (55 minutes)

Summary:

• What a Baltimore Ravens helmet teaches us about the importance of truth
• What happens to Christians when they go off to university?
• The 2007 study on attitudes of American professors to evangelical Christians
• Authors: Who wrote the gospels?
• Bias: Did the bias of the authors cause them to distort history?
• Contradictions: What about the different descriptions of events in the gospels?
• Dating: When were the gospels written?
• Eyewitnesses: Do the gospel accounts go back to eyewitness testimony?

This is basic training for Christians. They ought to show this lecture whenever new people show up, because pastors should not quote the Bible until everyone listening has this information straight.

Filed under: Videos, Acts, Apologetics, Author, Authorship, Bart Ehrman, Bias, Bible, Biography, Christian Apologetics, Contradiction, Contradictions, Date, Dating, Eyewitness, Eyewitnesses, Gospels, History, Inerrancy, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Mike Licona, New Testament, Paul, Peter

Mike Licona explains the As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Es of New Testament reliability

Mike Licona is one of my favorite Christian apologists. This lecture is even better than the last one I posted. I think that both of these lectures are must-see lectures for men. Men will love these lectures.

He explains why the four biographies in the New Testament should be accepted as historically accurate: (55 minutes)

Summary:

• What a Baltimore Ravens helmet teaches us about the importance of truth
• What happens to Christians when they go off to university?
• The 2007 study on attitudes of American professors to evangelical Christians
• Authors: Who wrote the gospels?
• Bias: Did the bias of the authors cause them to distort history?
• Contradictions: What about the different descriptions of events in the gospels?
• Dating: When were the gospels written?
• Eyewitnesses: Do the gospel accounts go back to eyewitness testimony?

This is basic training for Christians. They ought to show this lecture whenever new people show up, because pastors should not quote the Bible until everyone listening has this information straight.

Filed under: Videos, Acts, Apologetics, Author, Authorship, Bart Ehrman, Bias, Bible, Biography, Christian Apologetics, Contradiction, Contradictions, Date, Dating, Eyewitness, Eyewitnesses, Gospels, History, Inerrancy, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Mike Licona, New Testament, Paul, Peter

Review of the SMU debate on textual reliability with Wallace and Ehrman

From Kacie at “The Well-Thought-Out Life” blog.

Here are the speakers:

Bart Ehrman is a professor and scholar in the field of textual criticism. He literally wrote the book of textual criticism with his own professor, Metzger. Isaac has had his books as textbooks in his graduate studies on textual criticism. He’s also become known on the popular level, though, because he came out of fundamentalism to evangelicalism to liberalism to agnosticism (he’s a Moody and Wheaton grad). At the moment I’d call him an agnostic evangelist, and that’s why he intentionally is willing to do debates like this in the Bible Belt. He wants to engage conservative Christians and directly challenge their beliefs. He’s written books like Jesus, Interrupted, Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, and Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. His work is quite personal to me not only because of his attendance at Moody, but because his writings have drawn my friends away from Christianity.

On the opposite side you have Daniel Wallace. Wallace is also a textual critic, and on the scholarly level has written the textbook on Greek grammar that everyone uses, Harvard, Princeton, etc. He’s started the Center for Biblical Manuscripts, which is going around the world doing high quality photography of all of the ancient biblical manuscripts so that they are recorded for history. He’s a professor at Isaac’s school and has directly engaged the ideas of Ehrman in an essay, “The Gospel According to Bart: A Review Article of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.” He is an evangelical Christian and one of my husband’s professors.

Excerpt:

Isaac and I went to a debate on Saturday night between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace over the topic of “Can we trust the text of the New Testament.”

[...]In any case, this debate had a lot of buzz surrounding it and we bought tickets immediately. The first 500 went fast so they moved the debate to the larger auditorium on the campus of SMU. 1,500 people sold out the place. Why? Because of the speakers. Experts in the field of text criticism with opposite conclusions. I put both of their bios on the bottom of the post. In the crowd I saw DTS students, people with “atheist” on their t-shirts, Isaac’s professors, church staff, and a couple I know where she is a Christian and he’s an atheist.

It was fascinating. Both men were lucid and funny, but it ended up not being a debate so much about the evidence for the New Testament text as it was about presuppositions. I expected Ehrman to attack the text itself, since he is a textual critic and that’s what the title of his books hint at. Instead he sort of argued from our points of ignorance – the first 150 years after the texts were originally written before our early fragments and manuscripts. Ehrman granted so many of Wallace’s points – that the New Testament has a vast amount more evidence supporting it than any other ancient document. That while there are lots of little variants in the text, the vast majority of them make no difference in the actual meaning, and few if any make any difference to Christian theology. That even without the early documentary evidence that we have, the early church fathers quote the scripture so much that you can almost recreate the entire NT from their quotes alone.

What was his point? The statement he made again and again was that while the evidence for the text was good and actually unparalleled, we don’t know for sure. Can we be certain? Is it proven? Wallace kept coming back and pointing out that he wasn’t saying that we could absolutely know for sure or that we couldn’t know for sure – he was just examining the evidence and saying that based on the mountains of evidence it looks as though we probably have a trustworthy text today.

It was fascinating. Wallace sounded like the scientist, since he was the one following where the evidence led him. Wallace gave loads of evidence, often from Ehrman himself, for the unmatched reliability of the NT text, and for the field of text criticism to help solve the places where there are variants – to get back to the “original” text. Most of it Ehrman didn’t disagree with. Ehrman just kept saying that before the earliest fragments begin there’s a gap and so we can’t know for sure that the text is trustworthy.

[...]In the Q & A later someone asked Ehrman what sort of manuscript evidence he would need in front of him to convince him of the reliability of the text. He said that he’d want a copy made within the first week of writing and with .01% variance. Really? So essentially he says it’s not trustworthy unless it’s one step away from the original. Wallace’s first and perhaps most necessary point was that there are three paths to take, and Ehrman walks the far left – radical skepticism. Wallace is a moderate. He may be a theological conservative, but his approach to the text is moderate.

If you want to see a nice debate feature Ehrman on textual reliability, you can listen to the Ehrman-Williams debate. I recommend a lot of debates, but this one is one of the best I have heard on this topic. At least read my snarky summary, it’s one of my favorite snarky summaries.

Filed under: News, Apostasy, Bart Ehrman, Bible, Book, Contradiction, Daniel Wallace, Debate, Errancy, Error, Fundamentalism, Greek, Inerrancy, Manuscript, Misquoting Jesus, New Testament, Textual Criticism, Variant

Does atheism rationally ground the capacity for making moral judgments?

In Christian theology, a classical definition of evil is found in the work of Augustine of Hippo. He states that the evil is not a thing itself, and therefore is not brought into being by God. Instead, evil is the privation of right order. Or, to put it more simply, evil is the state of affairs when things are the way they ought not to be. So, if a mugger mugs you and steals your money, that was evil, because humans ought not to do that. And if a tsunami leaves thousands of people homeless, that’s evil, because the world ought not to be like that. (Let’s bracket why God might allow natural evil, such as the latter example, for another post).

The point is that when you talk about evil and suffering, it pre-supposes that the world is not the way it ought to be. But that means that the world ought to be some way. If the world “ought to be” any way other than it is, then that pre-supposes a designer, who had a purpose for the world, i.e. – a way the world ought to be.

So, atheists cannot use the apparently gratuitous evil in the world as a disproof that there is a God until they define what they mean by evil, and explain how this objective standard of good and evil came to exist.

So what is evil on atheism? An answer that is NOT open to atheists is the solution above, namely, that evil is a departure from the way things ought to be. Because the universe is an accident on atheism – it is purposeless – there is no way the universe ought to be. We are accidents on atheism. There is no way we ought to be.

So evil must mean one of two things on atheism:

1. Evil means something that the atheist finds personally distasteful. It is a subjective preference that each person decides for themselves. Just as some people don’t like broccoli – some people don’t like murder or tsunamis. It’s up to each person. But that cannot be used as an argument against God, because who says that God’s moral purposes ought to be connected to the personal moral preferences of atheists? It won’t work.
2. Evil is what society says is counter to the social conventions of a particular time and place. If we decide that murder is against our society’s conventions today, then for that time and place, murder is “evil”. But then, not signaling when you turn right at a stop sign is also “evil”. It’s all just made-up conventions. And again, it is difficult to see why God should be bound by a society’s conception of good and evil, they are just conventions of accidental people, on an accidental planet, in an accidental universe. (Again, we will bracket the problem of deciding what a society is for this discussion).

Neither of those options is going to allow an atheist to claim that God is evil. Because their basis for saying so is either going to be their personal preferences or the arbitrary conventions of the culture they happen to live in in arbitrary time and place.

So, it seems to me that pressing the problem of evil is inconsistent on atheism. There is no moral standard that an atheist can use to hold God accountable, in an accidental universe. You have to pre-suppose an objective moral standard, and a designer of the universe who makes that standard and makes it applicable, before you can proceed to hold God accountable to that standard. But then, you have already assumed God in order to argue against him.

To learn more about the difficulties that atheists have in making sense of morality, I really recommend this lecture (MP3) on the problems of evil and suffering by Doug Geivett (hosted by Apologetics 315), and this short 4-page paper on the problem of evil as well.

Filed under: Polemics, Apologetics, Atheism, Contradiction, Evil, Evil and Suffering, God, Good, Goodness, Laws of Logic, Logic, Moral, Morality, Objective, Philosophy of Religion, Problem of Evil, Standard, Subjective, Theism