If there’s one thing I’d have you consider upfront, it is how Calvinism will impact your life personally. And by that, I mean how it shapes the way you view your family.
Don’t make the mistake of putting philosophical distance between the ideas and where the rubber hits the road.
Why Calvinism Is Wrong
In 2018, I made the following Facebook post:
Here’s the #1 reason I’m no longer a Calvinist. I have a 2-month-old at home. If I were an honest Calvinist (Reformed), in the next few years I would have to say to her “Sweet one, sit down for a minute and let me explain something to you. See my skin? I’m white and I can’t change that. That’s the way God made me. In the same way, God created you as a sinner and you can’t change that yourself. He’s the only one who can change you, but He probably doesn’t want to. Most of the people He creates go to be tortured in hell forever because He chooses not to help them. God gets what He wants and He may not want you. I love you, but I’m not sure that God does.”
NOTE: I do not say that a Calvinist SHOULD say these things to their children. You might imagine the emotional devastation that would cause. But this is where the ideas lead. And, there are a lot of kids (and adults) who eventually figure it out. I did. And it crushed me. See The Dark Side of Calvinism for some of these devastating results.
I usually get two objections when I bring up this “I don’t know if God wants to save my child” argument as one of the main problems with Calvinism.
First, some say there’s no reason to make this so personal. I reply that IT IS PERSONAL. As a father and future grandfather, I have to consider whether or not God and I are working towards the same goals. Am I working for my child’s well-being, but God is not?
Are we on the same team?
Put a name and a face to it. Does God truly want to save __? Or did He create them with no intention of saving them, and they’ll endure never-ending misery?
Second, some object when I say “He’s the only one who can change you, but He probably doesn’t want to.” How can I say that He PROBABLY doesn’t want to? Most Calvinists will say that they assume that God wants to save everyone they meet.
But that doesn’t change the odds.
My estimation of probability is purely mathematical. Will more people end up in hell or heaven? I have never met a Calvinist who believes that there will be more people saved than not. Not many will enter through the narrow gate.
There have been times in my life when I have not wanted to father another child because I did that math. If the chances are that poor and the stakes are so high, why would I help bring another conscious being into this reality?
Why would I ever roll that loaded set of dice?
Think about that for a moment. Would you let your 2-year-old go across the street when they wanted because they had a chance of making it across? When you bring a child into this world with the Calvinist worldview, that’s the kind of absurd risk you’re taking. It’s one of the main reasons I believe Calvinism is wrong and a key refutation of Calvinism.
And don’t forget that the 2-year-old would most likely die if they got hit. But the person you help bring into existence when you have sex will not die. They will live on forever, likely in unimaginable suffering. According to Calvinism, most of the people born on the day you read this will be suspended in a state of misery forever.
What do some of the most notable Calvinist preachers think that suffering will be like? Here’s Jonathan Edwards:
Is hell as Sodom was, all full of nothing but fire and brimstone, continual incessant peals of thunder and glaring flashes of lightning upon everyone’s face and through everyone’s heart, and that without any cessation, which they shall feel to the utmost and yet live to feel more? It shall not be as when anyone is killed with lightning in this world: he is killed in a moment and neither hears, nor perhaps feels, anything; or if he does, ’tis but for a moment. But in hell, they shall feel it all; they shall feel the dismal pain and rendings of soul that it will cause, and that without ceasing. It will not be one flash of lightning, and then an intermission, and another by and by, but the lightning will be one perpetual glare, and all in the same soul.
When you die your soul will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it: but at the day of judgment your body will join your soul, and then you wilt have twin hells, body and soul shall be together, each brimful of pain, your soul sweating in its innermost pore drops of blood, and your body from head to foot suffused with agony; conscience, judgment, memory, all tortured, but more — your head tormented with racking pains, your eyes popping from their sockets with sights of blood and woe; your ears tormented with sullen moans and hollow groans, and shrieks of tortured ghosts.
Your heart beating with high fever; your pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony; your limbs crackling like the martyrs in the fire, and yet unburnt; yourself, put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet coming out undestroyed; all your veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string, on which the devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of hell’s unutterable lament; your soul forever and ever aching, and your body palpitating in unison with your soul.
It is not uncommon for a Calvinist (or Arminian for that matter) to attempt to downplay the degree of suffering after hearing these types of creative musings.
What, then? Is hell tolerable?
However “not that bad” you attempt to make it does not change its longevity. Its never-endingness makes whatever the bad situation is unbearable because there will never be a single moment of relief.
And this is the non-end toward which some of your offspring are likely headed.
Why?
Because God called them forth out of nothingness in a fallen state, is the only one who can save them, and yet has no intention of saving them from infinite suffering.
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