I wondered how quickly it would be before someone started complaining that Calvinism was Orwellian instead. I fully expect someone will start bringing up the point of Johnny’s original post elsewhere (I expected it would be Johnny ), that Calvinists routinely engage in an evangelical outreach that uses forms of expression conceptually much more in line with Arminianism. And that when people figure this out, they can naturally feel like they’ve been bait-and-switched.
(I can’t say I didn’t add a bit to that myself, either: I often point out that important terms used by Arms and Calvs, but much moreso by Calvs, mean the opposite of what they literally say. And, I would argue, opposite of what the scriptures have to say on those topics, although I’m sure Calvs don’t intend for that to happen.)
Rather than threading off on that (in this thread anyway–we already have a recent thread for that), would it suffice to observe that universalists (typically converting from one of the other two soteriology branches) tend to feel like they were being authoritatively oppressed by Orwellian double-speak, and so are likely to be touchy about accusations that they’re engaging in it themselves?–especially when such an accusation is in regard to something clearly not intended by its promoters to be a hidden reversal of meaning but instead intended to be an explicit comparison of concepts as a shorthand way of describing differences and similarities between concepts? (i.e. something pretty much the opposite of Orwellian newspeak and doublethink?)