Calvinists would let neither Bayesian reasoning nor Intuitions about torture dissuade them from their faith. How could they? Those are human inventions which can detract less than nothing from the glory of God.
Truly they make a mockery of Jesus whom they claim to follow.
Straw men everywhere. I'm not a Calvinist either, but the Calvinist view is more consistent than you propose.
No Calvinist would base their worldview solely on the Biblical passages explicitly discussing predestination. Those passages are meant to be understood in the broader context of the entire Bible, which includes its emphasis on love, humility, the Sermon on the Mount, the Great Commission, etc. Celebrating the suffering of others would never fit with this full understanding of the Bible.
Even though we deserve eternal torment, we are also instructed to embrace brotherly love here on earth. If that seems contradictory, it's because Calvinists have more comfort with contradiction than most, although I'd add that all Christians tolerate some level of contradiction due to the nature of the Trinity, free will and sovereignty, etc. Calvinists just tolerate more than most. In their view, the embracing of that contradiction is what keeps their faith rich and a continuous journey of exploration and understanding. In this way, contradiction is a literary device designed to engage debate and tension in the readers, similar to how both Leo Strauss and Jewish scholars understand contradiction. Without it, the Bible would be too simple to engage with for 4,500 years+ as it has been.
Well, I'm a Calvinist who stumbled upon this. Probably not the best interlocutor for Calvinism, and not interested in a lengthy debate, but I'll address a few issues as I understand them, in no particular order:
1.
Calvinism flows from treating the Bible as a document that presents a single, true, internally consistent theology. If you don't think the Bible is true, then you're never going to be convinced of Calvinism. But for those who adopt it, it's usually because a lightbulb went off when we realized it was a coherent framework for interpreting every part of the Bible, and that a lot of verses we struggled with now suddenly make sense.
2.
To your objection "it’s equally likely that there’s a Muslim Calvinist God", my assessment at the time I became a Christian was that if God provided any revelation to humanity, it was most likely recorded in the Bible. Against nearly any imaginable modern criticism that can be applied to the Bible, the Quran and the Hadith are going to fare much worse and have a much harder time defending themselves, which is why it is not equally likely there's a "Muslim Calvinist God".
Again, Calvinism is centered on the idea that the Bible is entirely true.
3.
On being created only to be damned, etc. - For one, to some degree Calvinism is only making explicit a tension that is at least implicit in any historical school of Christian doctrine: why are we punished by our Creator for things he, being omniscient, surely saw coming at the moment of creation and could therefore have avoided?
At some level, my answer is, "I don't know," other than agreeing with the notion of Compatibilism: there is still a "you" that is making choices, and you're responsible for them even if they were foreordained at the foundation of the world.
In some ways, we face a related problem every day on Earth: how can we punish someone, or even get angry at him, for wrongs he has committed when he's merely a product of some combination of his environment and his genetics, which he ultimately didn't choose? How can we indict Hitler as the very image of evil when perhaps he might have been just another quirky vegetarian who painted landscapes and portraits of dogs that he sold to tourists out of a little studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea, if not for circumstances and certain elements of his disposition that he never chose?
I don't know, but the answer "we can't" is deeply unsatisfying.
As an aside, one of the virtues of Calvinism is that it forces us to approach salvation with supreme humility. I did not choose God on account of my own goodness or intelligence, but instead was chosen by God's grace. If salvation DID come to me by merit of my qualities, that only elevates the problem one step further, since it's not as though I had an opportunity, prior to my birth, to choose those qualities for myself. In the Calvinist understanding, to claim any credit for accepting Christ or for the good works you did in his name is an act of arrogance.
I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that when you get technical, Aquinas and official Catholic doctrine don't differ nearly as much from Calvinism on some of these questions as it might appear on the surface; some of the differences are merely on emphasis.
Note that there are also various Reformed attempts to address these questions of sin and foreknowledge by way of the ordering of God's decrees (i.e., the various "-lapsarianisms"):
On the damning of infants, etc. For one, as a point of clarification, the idea that infants are saved by virtue of being baptized (baptismal regeneration) is not considered Calvinist. It's a Roman Catholic doctrine that Calvin explicitly rejected. Infants are saved by virtue of being elect, which Calvin believed ought to be signified (though not caused) by baptism, while Reformed/Calvinistic Baptists disagree.
I understand that our sin consists of both original sin and all actual transgressions. If your list of actual transgressions is short-to-nonexistent (as in the case of an infant), then original sin still includes your capacity for sin, and is sufficient for God's wrath. Our capacity for sin is vast, and most of us live lives in which we never know the depths of the evils of which we're capable, should we be placed in the wrong circumstances.
I also don't imagine that infant, upon arriving in hell, is an infant, or at least he doesn't remain one for long. Perhaps no one in hell is an adult or a child, as we would understand the terms.
5.
On Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) - To be sure, there's nothing specific to Calvinism about this doctrine, which applies to all historic forms of Christianity.
To me, it makes the most sense when one considers that sin continues in hell, like a prisoner that keeps committing felonies in prison and thus keeps seeing his sentence extended. That said, while in my mind there's no escaping that ECT is the fate of some, I'm inclined to think that annihilationism is also compatible with Scripture and it's quite possible that God in his mercy annihilates many (or even most), though it is not necessary that he do so.
I suppose I'd object to anyone who thinks he has the nature of hell figured out, though we're free to speculate. The Bible provides little detail, beyond letting us know it's a place we want to avoid, so the important thing is that we accept Christ's free offer of salvation and avoid it. I trust in God's justice and mercy.
I'll also say, not to imply Sproul is necessarily right about everything, but that Sproul YouTube clip is edited to be incendiary and misleading. Here's a more complete treatment of what he said:
“... widely-held Christian doctrine, according to which we all deserve eternal torment, and only Jesus saves us by suffering in our place.”
Given that there are a couple billion Christians, this doctrine is “widely held” in raw numbers. But it’s not widely held as a percentage of all Christians throughout history.
Catholic theologians would say that none of us deserves eternal life with God, and yet Jesus has made it possible for us to receive this. But being undeserving of eternal bliss is a much weaker condition than being deserving of eternal torment, which is not Catholic or Orthodox doctrine.
I watched the Sproul video, and his argument seems to be that in heaven the blessed will be so enraptured by the vision of God that they won’t care what’s happening to anyone else. This is an extreme hyper-Protestant point of view, where the only relationships that matter are the one-to-one relationships between individual humans and God. Catholic and Orthodox doctrine say that the relationships between human beings are significant, and indeed have eternal significance.
To be fair to Calvinists, while they do explicitly grasp more insane and depraved nettles than most, the basic combination of predestination ante praevisa merita and eternal conscious torment is common to a large portion of the Western church, if pressed to explicitly state their views.
To me, what's bizarre how such a cruel and evil religion was also the faith of the Dutch during the most glorious period of their people's history. They were a remarkable nation: industrious, hard-working, disciplined, respectful, free. They became one of the world's great empires, along with the French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
They deserve respect. But that still isn't enough to get me to see or say anything good about their faith. It's the worst of all Protestant faiths, as unappealing a faith as exists, and it would be better to submit to Hell than to be in the Heaven of such an evil god. I only wonder what made the Dutch take so long to abandon their religion.
Calvinists would let neither Bayesian reasoning nor Intuitions about torture dissuade them from their faith. How could they? Those are human inventions which can detract less than nothing from the glory of God.
Truly they make a mockery of Jesus whom they claim to follow.
Straw men everywhere. I'm not a Calvinist either, but the Calvinist view is more consistent than you propose.
No Calvinist would base their worldview solely on the Biblical passages explicitly discussing predestination. Those passages are meant to be understood in the broader context of the entire Bible, which includes its emphasis on love, humility, the Sermon on the Mount, the Great Commission, etc. Celebrating the suffering of others would never fit with this full understanding of the Bible.
Even though we deserve eternal torment, we are also instructed to embrace brotherly love here on earth. If that seems contradictory, it's because Calvinists have more comfort with contradiction than most, although I'd add that all Christians tolerate some level of contradiction due to the nature of the Trinity, free will and sovereignty, etc. Calvinists just tolerate more than most. In their view, the embracing of that contradiction is what keeps their faith rich and a continuous journey of exploration and understanding. In this way, contradiction is a literary device designed to engage debate and tension in the readers, similar to how both Leo Strauss and Jewish scholars understand contradiction. Without it, the Bible would be too simple to engage with for 4,500 years+ as it has been.
Well, I'm a Calvinist who stumbled upon this. Probably not the best interlocutor for Calvinism, and not interested in a lengthy debate, but I'll address a few issues as I understand them, in no particular order:
1.
Calvinism flows from treating the Bible as a document that presents a single, true, internally consistent theology. If you don't think the Bible is true, then you're never going to be convinced of Calvinism. But for those who adopt it, it's usually because a lightbulb went off when we realized it was a coherent framework for interpreting every part of the Bible, and that a lot of verses we struggled with now suddenly make sense.
2.
To your objection "it’s equally likely that there’s a Muslim Calvinist God", my assessment at the time I became a Christian was that if God provided any revelation to humanity, it was most likely recorded in the Bible. Against nearly any imaginable modern criticism that can be applied to the Bible, the Quran and the Hadith are going to fare much worse and have a much harder time defending themselves, which is why it is not equally likely there's a "Muslim Calvinist God".
Again, Calvinism is centered on the idea that the Bible is entirely true.
3.
On being created only to be damned, etc. - For one, to some degree Calvinism is only making explicit a tension that is at least implicit in any historical school of Christian doctrine: why are we punished by our Creator for things he, being omniscient, surely saw coming at the moment of creation and could therefore have avoided?
At some level, my answer is, "I don't know," other than agreeing with the notion of Compatibilism: there is still a "you" that is making choices, and you're responsible for them even if they were foreordained at the foundation of the world.
In some ways, we face a related problem every day on Earth: how can we punish someone, or even get angry at him, for wrongs he has committed when he's merely a product of some combination of his environment and his genetics, which he ultimately didn't choose? How can we indict Hitler as the very image of evil when perhaps he might have been just another quirky vegetarian who painted landscapes and portraits of dogs that he sold to tourists out of a little studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea, if not for circumstances and certain elements of his disposition that he never chose?
I don't know, but the answer "we can't" is deeply unsatisfying.
As an aside, one of the virtues of Calvinism is that it forces us to approach salvation with supreme humility. I did not choose God on account of my own goodness or intelligence, but instead was chosen by God's grace. If salvation DID come to me by merit of my qualities, that only elevates the problem one step further, since it's not as though I had an opportunity, prior to my birth, to choose those qualities for myself. In the Calvinist understanding, to claim any credit for accepting Christ or for the good works you did in his name is an act of arrogance.
I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that when you get technical, Aquinas and official Catholic doctrine don't differ nearly as much from Calvinism on some of these questions as it might appear on the surface; some of the differences are merely on emphasis.
Note that there are also various Reformed attempts to address these questions of sin and foreknowledge by way of the ordering of God's decrees (i.e., the various "-lapsarianisms"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_order_of_God%27s_decrees
4.
On the damning of infants, etc. For one, as a point of clarification, the idea that infants are saved by virtue of being baptized (baptismal regeneration) is not considered Calvinist. It's a Roman Catholic doctrine that Calvin explicitly rejected. Infants are saved by virtue of being elect, which Calvin believed ought to be signified (though not caused) by baptism, while Reformed/Calvinistic Baptists disagree.
I understand that our sin consists of both original sin and all actual transgressions. If your list of actual transgressions is short-to-nonexistent (as in the case of an infant), then original sin still includes your capacity for sin, and is sufficient for God's wrath. Our capacity for sin is vast, and most of us live lives in which we never know the depths of the evils of which we're capable, should we be placed in the wrong circumstances.
I also don't imagine that infant, upon arriving in hell, is an infant, or at least he doesn't remain one for long. Perhaps no one in hell is an adult or a child, as we would understand the terms.
5.
On Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) - To be sure, there's nothing specific to Calvinism about this doctrine, which applies to all historic forms of Christianity.
To me, it makes the most sense when one considers that sin continues in hell, like a prisoner that keeps committing felonies in prison and thus keeps seeing his sentence extended. That said, while in my mind there's no escaping that ECT is the fate of some, I'm inclined to think that annihilationism is also compatible with Scripture and it's quite possible that God in his mercy annihilates many (or even most), though it is not necessary that he do so.
I suppose I'd object to anyone who thinks he has the nature of hell figured out, though we're free to speculate. The Bible provides little detail, beyond letting us know it's a place we want to avoid, so the important thing is that we accept Christ's free offer of salvation and avoid it. I trust in God's justice and mercy.
I'll also say, not to imply Sproul is necessarily right about everything, but that Sproul YouTube clip is edited to be incendiary and misleading. Here's a more complete treatment of what he said:
https://www.challies.com/articles/can-we-enjoy-heaven-knowing-loved-ones-are-in-hell/
How would Gavin Ortlund's views on calvinism be different than Calvin and Sproul ?
“... widely-held Christian doctrine, according to which we all deserve eternal torment, and only Jesus saves us by suffering in our place.”
Given that there are a couple billion Christians, this doctrine is “widely held” in raw numbers. But it’s not widely held as a percentage of all Christians throughout history.
Catholic theologians would say that none of us deserves eternal life with God, and yet Jesus has made it possible for us to receive this. But being undeserving of eternal bliss is a much weaker condition than being deserving of eternal torment, which is not Catholic or Orthodox doctrine.
I watched the Sproul video, and his argument seems to be that in heaven the blessed will be so enraptured by the vision of God that they won’t care what’s happening to anyone else. This is an extreme hyper-Protestant point of view, where the only relationships that matter are the one-to-one relationships between individual humans and God. Catholic and Orthodox doctrine say that the relationships between human beings are significant, and indeed have eternal significance.
To be fair to Calvinists, while they do explicitly grasp more insane and depraved nettles than most, the basic combination of predestination ante praevisa merita and eternal conscious torment is common to a large portion of the Western church, if pressed to explicitly state their views.
To me, what's bizarre how such a cruel and evil religion was also the faith of the Dutch during the most glorious period of their people's history. They were a remarkable nation: industrious, hard-working, disciplined, respectful, free. They became one of the world's great empires, along with the French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
They deserve respect. But that still isn't enough to get me to see or say anything good about their faith. It's the worst of all Protestant faiths, as unappealing a faith as exists, and it would be better to submit to Hell than to be in the Heaven of such an evil god. I only wonder what made the Dutch take so long to abandon their religion.