An Even Deeper Calvinism

Calvinism is not what you get when you apply depraved interpretations of Christianity consistently. What you get is far bleaker.

1 Hell and Calvin

A brief note: when I talk about Calvinists in this article, I’m talking about only the most extreme variety of Calvinist (which might be most Calvinists). I’m not talking about someone like Gavin Ortlund. I’m talking about those who think humans are irredeemably wicked and deserving of hell but that God through his irresistable grace arbitrarily chooses a few billion people to be elect and saves them, while sending everyone else to the eternal dungeon where their screams ring out for all of eternity. I’m not talking about all Calvinists, but instead about many of the Calvinist popularizers, who are seen as embodying the maximal consistency of the Christian notion that we deserve hell.

I’m afraid of hell sometimes.

I’ll hear someone like R.C. Sproul talk about how unmitigatedly wicked we humans are, and how we deserve eternal torment. He’ll describe that hell isn’t like fire and brimstone but is instead far worse—for the reality of a true horror exceeds our predictions of it. Now, I’m pretty sure Sproul is a psychopathic ghoul (it rhymes you see)—one who goes on about how you’ll be so sanctified (when Calvinists say sanctified you should instead read the word evil) in heaven that you’ll rejoice at your own mother’s torment in hell. But, well, that’s what people say about Peter Singer—and he’s right about most stuff.

It’s always possible that my worldview is totally backward and that I’m just deeply confused about the nature of reality—and, say, the Calvinists who believe in infant damnation are right. Now, I don’t think this is remotely likely. They affirm a deeply wicked God whose goodness is a sham, meaning nothing beyond that he is sovereign, that he can do what he wants. But while I think their view is wildly implausible, there’s still some probability—maybe 1 in a million—that they’re right and I’m massively confused about everything.

And you can’t even get out of this worry by being a Christian. Being a Christian will not save my loved ones on such a view and it’s equally likely that there’s a Muslim Calvinist God who demands absolute obedience to spare you from eternal torture.

A good Bayesian shouldn’t be certain of anything. Not even that a supposedly perfect God isn’t something I’d regard to be a wicked, barbaric despot.

Calvinists often are seen as the most morally consistent of the Christian lot. While other Christians say “we’re all so wicked that we deserve hellfire,” the Calvinists to whom I refer grant that this applies to infants as well. That an unbaptized baby will suffer forever in hell for its wickedness.

Or take the quote from Sproul I gave earlier, about how the elect will be so sanctified in heaven that they’ll rejoice at the screams of their mother in hell. This is obviously an evil doctrine, so exquisitely wicked and depraved that you know it came from either the devil himself or a Calvinist. But it does seem like it follows from widely-held Christian doctrine, according to which we all deserve eternal torment, and only Jesus saves us by suffering in our place.

My Catholic friend James who might dislike Calvinism even more than I do said that Calvinism is what you get when you take Augustine’s mistaken and wicked views and let them be untempered by anything resembling a conscience. But I don’t think this is quite right, and that’s what I intend to argue in the remainder of this article. Calvinism doesn’t go as far as one should logically go if they accept certain particular mistaken Christian doctrines. What they should accept is an even deeper Calvinism, an even more wicked doctrine.

2 Slapping babies, sending no one to heaven, and favoring the holocaust

I think the holocaust was bad.

Virtuous, I know! Hopefully you do as well! People being marched to death camps and being exterminated after suffering in the most extreme conditions imaginable is a horror of unbelievable proportions. But why should a Calvinist think it’s bad?

Most of the victims of the holocaust are not the elect. They were mostly Jews and other groups. Groups that are, on the Calvinist view, deserving of everlasting torment. But it’s good to give people what they deserve, right? We generally don’t think it’s bad for Hitler to get a kidney stone. So if there was one who deserved a fate infinitely worse than a kidney stone, why would it be bad for them to get that?

Maybe the answer is that it’s not bad for them to get it but it is bad for us to give it to them because we don’t have the right to do so. But that’s also obviously morally repugnant. The Holocaust was an unfortunate event, not merely one with perpetrators acting wrongly.

The Calvinists to whom I refer seem to have this utterly bizarre view wherein we all deserve infinite torment, but strangely that should only be inflicted posthumously. Why? It’s good for people to get what they deserve regardless of whether they get it now or in the future. What one deserves isn’t temporally contingent.

Or here’s another question: why create us at all? Suppose that there were some beings so wicked that they’d deserve everlasting torment. Why make them in the first place? Maybe you’d make them if you could reform them, but if God can reform us, why doesn’t he? If Hitler’s mother had known she’d birth a monster, having a child would clearly have been wrong. So why, if we’re as evil as the Calvinists suggest, does God make us at all?

Finally, on this view, how does one make sense of Jesus saving people at all. If someone deserves something, another better person suffering in their place doesn’t absolve the guilt. Hitler shouldn’t have been able to avoid capital punishment but his nicer brother taking the fall for him. So if we really are deserving of eternal torment, how does Jesus absolve us of this?

If one really takes seriously the doctrine that, as Sproul says, we’re closer to Hitler than to Christ and thus deserve everlasting suffering, that God either cannot or will not reform us, then they get all these wildly crazy results according to which pain is bad, infants are damned, and our creation is wholly inexplicable. Calvinism is not the worldview that one gets if they just believe we’re so wicked that we deserve eternal torment.

Calvinism may be closer to logical consistency than various other implausible sects of Christianity. But it is still far from logical consistency. Consistent Calvinism is a dark, dismal, and grisly reality, one that not even Calvinists who joyously shout about rejoicing in their own mother’s eternal torment could stomach.