While doing some background research for my promised post on the theology of ‘Pastor Mark’ Driscoll – soon to be available on a forum near you! – I stumbled across the following quotation from the well-know Reformed, hyper-Calvinist big-hitter John Piper:
The quote comes in the context of a published dialogue between Piper and our own Dr Thomas Talbott in the Reformed Journal, way back in 1983. Veterans of this board will know that the dialogue itself has been discussed here before, and that Dr Talbott has since lamented the overtly polemical tone he adopted in it (well, it *was *30 years ago).
But anyway …
I was *astonished *when I read Piper’s comment, which comes after a moving, and clearly heartfelt declaration of his paternal love and care towards his three children. My first thought was one of sadness, desperate sadness that a man who clearly loved his kids was having to live with the idea that one – maybe all – of them might be reprobate, might be predestined by God for hell, and therefore damned for all eternity, with no possibility of redemption.
And then gradually, as I contemplated the comment (in the context of the dialogue, and of Reformed theology generally), my sadness turned into anger, and ultimately to outrage. How dare he? How *dare *Piper say such an appalling thing, and ascribe such appalling unloving behaviour to God?
My outrage crystallised into two thoughts:
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Thank God I don’t have Piper for a father. He only “thinks” he’d give his life to save his children from an eternity of suffering in hell. Wow, thanks dad! You brought me unbidden into the world, presumably to gratify your God-given instinct to procreate, and yet you’re not sure you would lay down your own life to stop me burning in hell forever and ever and ever. You’re the greatest!
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Thank God Piper’s god is a man-made myth. Thank God Piper’s god is a figment of his own blind and rebellious imagination, not the God who is love as revealed in scripture, and in the person of Jesus Christ.
It’s amazing, but in those few lines Piper encapsulates all that is unbiblical, all that is illogical, all that is unloving, all that is plain wrong with Reformed theology, and the despicable and sinful human notion that a God of love would deliberately choose not to save some of His beloved children, for no reason whatsoever.
Give the man credit, though. At least he has the guts to fess up and boldly admit that the god he believes in does deliberately choose to burn some of his creatures eternally – something Mark Driscoll never does. Driscoll pussyfoots around this unpalatable – nay repulsive – ‘truth’ of Calvinism like a cat on hot bricks. Listen to or read his sermons – even those on predestination and ‘limited unlimited atonement’ – and you could quite easily conclude that he thinks it’s all up to us whether we repent of our sins, turn to Jesus, and hence avoid eternal hellfire and damnation.
When of course he believes nothing of the sort. It was all decided before the Big Bang, before time even began.
Because you’re a sinner, a son or daughter of Adam, you deserve to die, to be punished eternally, for the wicked crime of being a normal, sinful, god-created human being. But god, in his inscrutable wisdom, chose some people, some of his children, to be rescued from sin by Jesus, with the result that they get to live with him forever. These lucky people are ‘the elect’.
Fortunately for Pastor Mark – and indeed for John Piper – they’re among these lucky ones. They are part of ‘the elect’. (How they know this for certain I’m not sure …)
In his published sermon on predestination Driscoll tells a lengthy, emotional and ultimately fatuous, supposedly true story about snatching his young daughter out of the path of a speeding truck. The point of this story? To illustrate the saving ‘love’ of god, the saving ‘grace’ of god, towards undeserving sinners.
The irony, of course, which doesn’t seem to have struck ‘Pastor Mark’, is that the god he believes in is also the god who deliberately and irrevocably chooses *not *to pluck that child from in front of the speeding truck, who lets her die screaming. And worse, sends her to an eternity of punishment and suffering afterwards!
Why didn’t you tell *that *version of the story, ‘Pastor Mark’?
Bottom line: reformed theology – Calvinism – call it what you will, is the ultimate selfish religion, the ‘I’m all right Jack’ religion.
Me, I’m one of the elect, I’m saved, I’m going to live with God in heaven forever. As for the unelect, those god chose not to save, even though he could have, well, they’re wicked, they’re evil, they’re to blame for their own sins, so they *deserve *eternal hell, they’ve got no-one to blame but themselves (this is Driscoll’s on the record opinion, by the way).
Excuse me, I need to go and lie down for a minute.
Shalom
Johnny
) people. And Mark Driscoll is a mega-church pastor with thousands of people – Christians, new Christians, would-be Christians – under his direct pastoral care. And many thousands, perhaps millions even, more people under his influence through the media – websites, books, interviews etc. When he shoots his mouth off (there I go again, sorry!), I mean when he preaches or teaches or annunciates, lots and lots of people listen. And lots of those people are very angry about what he’s saying. Just Google his name and find out what’s being said about him in the LGBT community, for example, or the secular media, or just by ordinary Christian and non-Christian folk.
)
Obviously disagreement with various schools of thought is not considered a problem on this forum, we just want to have it done in a respectful and humble way here.