New Review on Hunt's Book

I haven't had the opportunity to read Hunt's book but based upon this critique I would say its probably not worth reading. It sounds as if most of Hunts approachs to the text are far too stretched. It seems as if both Hunt and Doran have missed the context of many of the verses in question. I don't have time to address them all but consider this quote dealing with John 6:

The "lack of ability" for whom? Have both these scholars forgotten to ask a basic hermentical question, "Who is Christ's audience?"

Christ is speaking to Jews at a particular time in human history. Understanding that context is important.

We know from Paul and John's teaching later in chapter 12 that the Jews were being temporarily hardened by God. This is the reason they have this so called "lack of ability" to come to Christ while he was walking on the earth.

These two assume that Christ's words must be a universal teaching for the nature of the entire human race. Couldn't be as simple as Jesus saying to a group of hardened people, you can't come to me while I'm here on earth because God has only selected the twelve to be my apostles from the Jewish nation. Read the whole context and you will see that Jesus even speaks to the twelve as if they are the ones he is contrasting to the crowd.

Calvinists assume that Jesus' audience here in John 6 can't come to him because they were born Totally unable to do so. That is not what the text says. The text clearly explains that the reason they can't come is because (1) God hadn't given them to Christ (to be apostles as spoken of in chapter 17), (2) the Jews were being hardened temporarily to accomplish Christ's purposes and as the gospels explain the message of the gospel was being hidden in parables from them.

Let me ask this: Why would you need to hide the message of the gospel in parables from people who couldn't have understood it anyway? Christ knew that they might of understood and believed but it wasn't the right time for that to happen. They had to remain in the dark, hardened in their rebellion, in order for Christ to accomplish his purposes through them. They were not able to come to Christ, as his pupil on earth, because they were not one of the twelve chosen by God and given to Christ for that noble purpose.

 

Hi all! Newbie here.... anyway, I have no idea if this has been pointed out before, and if it has, please forgive the redundancy, James White has also spent some time with Dave Hunt, and is well acquainted with Hunt's errors, both before and since "What Love is This?" In case you don't have the link, here it is, and here, there are numerous responses to Hunt:

http://aomin.org/ReformedIndex.html

Blessings!!

 

I have read Dave Hunt's book, "What Love Is This?" It is true to the word of God, the Bible, and I have not found any error within it's pages. It does not, however, fortify Catholicism's first attempt at theology via Augustine which permeated the Dark Ages for mega centuries, remnants of which still fill some Christians with diabolical error. Chief defenders of this error are churches that believe the Five Points of Calvinism. These churches are believers who are essentially entrapped in the apostasy of Roman Catholic teaching of yesteryear. These believers are Catholics who merely skip over the errors of Purgatory, the Confessional, Mariolatry and so on.

Hunt's careful documentation is what makes his book so powerful; he uses the statements of his antagonists to destroy the errors of what Calvin systematized in his Institutes, having copied St. Augustine's philosophy/theology. John, fresh out of the priesthood, has handed a pile of error not only in the 1500's but many Christians have assimilated much of his thinking into many Protestant churches today.

I highly recommend it! Dave Hunt is as close to the truth as any theologian that I have ever read.

Rev. I. Ray Berrian, Th.D.

 

If that is the truest expression of theology you have read, you need to get out a bit more! LOL!! If you would like, I can give you a good reading list, that will more than take care of Hunt's flimsy .... well, I hate to even call them this... but... arguments....

 

PS, in regard to "These believers are Catholics who merely skip over the errors of Purgatory, the Confessional, Mariolatry and so on."

In other words, they are Catholics except for the fact that they aren't Catholics!!

 

John Owen,

I might be wrong but I think one of the original founders of Westminster Theological Seminary was a John Owen. Interesting.

You will find more than one person who knows that five point Calvinists are Catholics minus Roman Catholic add on theology. If you read other than Calvinistic books you will find how other people have traced Calvinism back to its dark and unscriptural abode in the Dark Ages. John Calvin has awkwardly portrayed Jesus as showing favortism toward some of His fallen human beings, while passing by the remaining ones who also need His mercy.

Calvin never dropped his Catholicism but carried it forward to poison the renewed church of Jesus Christ during the Protestant Reformation.

 

Actually Westminster was founded in the 1929, John Owen lived in 1616-1683, so you are just a bit off on that one It wouldn’t really matter anyway, even if he was.

Again, claiming that the Reformers are Catholics, except that they deny most of the central tenants of Catholicism(!!!), is to also say, Baptists are Roman Catholics, except for where they disagree with Roman Catholics. That’s patently absurd. Are the Baptists actually Roman Catholics because they adhere to a Trinitarian belief? Or that they both have the same books of the New Testament proves they are “really” the same as Catholics? Of course not. If the Reformers were just warmed over Catholics, then why did the Reformation ever take place? Why did people lose their lives to the persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church, if the Reformers were "really" just Roman Catholics in disguise? At any rate, who cares? Trying to link the 2 together does nothing, in and of itself, to prove that the doctrines of Calvinism are true or false. This must be proven by biblical testimony. And that, incidentally, is yet another place where the Reformers and Rome parted ways, namely adherence the adherence of the Reformers to Sola Scriptura, versus the two tiered Tradition and Scripture view that Rome has. Along with this Sola, there is also sola fide, sola gratia, and solus christus are also areas of extreme disagreement. And after all this time, the differences remain the same, they are just as important as ever, and unless Rome recants of their false views regarding the most important thing of all, namely how it is a sinful man is able to stand in the presence of a holy God, i.e. the very Gospel itself, there can be no reconciliation.

And actually, to be more precise, it is the Arminian view of salvation, or the Semi-Pelagian view, or by whatever name any view that places works and grace together as the necessary means of salvation goes by, (synergism) is far closer to Rome than any of the Reformers.

See Augustus Toplady’s “Arminianism: The Road to Rome” for more on this:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/9170/TOPLADY1.HTM

 

True, it might be more accurate to say that Calvinism (a theological system unknown to the early church--except that some of its points, eternal security and total depravity, were held by Gnostics) is discarded medieval Roman Catholic theology.

Augustine's theology was an innovation unknown to the ancient church. In the West it eventually became highly influential, but ultimately failed to dominate, what became the Roman Catholic Church in the middle ages. It never much influenced the East, what came to be known as the Orthodox Eastern Churches after the Roman schism. It was revitalized by certain Protestant Reformers (possibly because most of the RCC hadn't adopted it) who had been Augustinian Catholics, despite its absence from church history prior to Augustine except among Gnostic heretics. It was rightly rejected by the Anabaptists as incompatible with Biblical doctrine.

It should surprise no one to discover that Augustine had formerly been a Manichean, as that obviously tainted his theology to a noticeable degree for the rest of his life.

 

True, it might be better to say that Calvinism is just a return to biblical theology, back to the teachings of Christ Jesus and Paul.

And I think Calvin was right to say that the Anabaptists often think that they swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all! LOL!

 

This is an interesting point, as groups like ACE (Horton) and many others (I think White may have said it too) will claim that this issue was what the entire Reformation was all about. (leading to an insinuation that the Arminians are the ones still following Rome). This shows that that may be true; that Calvin, Luther and others were already persuaded in some of their beliefs and simply wanted a return to these Augustinian principles long discarded by the Church, and these principles helped then rediscover the biblical doctrine of salvation bt grace through faith alone, which became the familiar issue associated with the Reformation. (Is there any proof whether or not they were specifically "Augustinian Catholics" before hand?) Still, even if what we all agree is the truth of the Bible sprang from thess other convictions that came along with it, it does not prove the initial convictions were right.

 

John Owen,

I said, 'John Owen, I might be wrong but I think one of the original founders of Westminster
Theological Seminary was a John Owen.' The words 'might' and 'think' means that I even questioned my own statement. Anyway, after posting this I researched the name Owen and found out the era of time in which he lived in England. I seldom read 'five point Calvinistic error, so you will have to forgive me. I get some points knowing that Owen apparently taught theology that was in error.

Reformed Baptists hold to the old theology of Augustine/Calvin which they welcomed as orthodox, New Testament theology, as do Primitive Baptists. While the Catholic church originally believed in sovereignty as in the later to come Calvin Institutes, the named church is presently semi-Pelagian in Christian theology. They rightly hold to more of a free will viewpoint.

 

Ray, I am aware that you used words like "might" and "I think", I was just pointing out to you that your tentative ideas were mistaken, is that OK? Would you have preferred to persist in error? No need to be defensive, heck, I have been wrong at least a time or two! LOL!! And hey, I was not aware we were dealing with a point system here. How many points do you get for realizing that John Owen was a 5 point Calvinist? How many points do I get for pointing out that you were in error regarding Owens’s involvement with the framing of the Westminster Confession?!?!

BTW, his (John Owen) book "The Death of Death in the Death of Christ" is a thoroughly biblical treatise proving that the doctrine of particular election (of course the "L" in TULIP) is indeed, the teaching of Holy Scripture. And hey, this book has been waiting since the mid 1600's for someone to correct his Calvinistic error, his own comments concerning it ever being refuted were "but fully resolved that I shall not live to see a solid answer given unto it.'" And, as JI Packer aptly notes in the modern foreword; "Time has justified his optimism."

I would also like to point out that if you fail to read the writings of your theological opponents, then you will most likely end up not understanding their position, nor your own. However, if you want to live with head stuck in the sand, that’s up to you.


I am already aware of the beliefs of the Reformed Baptists, because "I is one" .... thanks though... and I might mention, not all Reformed Baptists are Calvinistic, and this is really unfortunate, because the term is really becoming so fluid... its like being called a "Protestant" or even better a "Baptist"... there is always some explaining to do to define exactly what flavor of Baptist on is... as for me, to set the record straight, I, and the church I belong to, adhere to the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (not in a way that supercedes Scripture of Course), and I am thus a very conservative Christian, affirming infallibility, inerrancy, an orthodox understanding of God's Triune nature and am Augustinian or Calvinistic in regard to the Soteriology I adhere to. So I am in the line of Spurgeon, Dabney, Bunyan, and Strong, you know, those biblically illiterate idiots....
I might also add that my professor in Systematic Theology coined the term "Eschataphobic" (LOL!!) for me, as I have an aversion to looking too deeply into Eschatology, as it stands, I am not Dispensational, and lean towards Amil.

... however, Particular Baptists often, but not always, are hyper-Calvinists. And if they did not fall into this error, they fell into the other equally serious error of Arminianism, and into Liberalism, as is seen among General Baptists.

One writer gives us these stirring words, and I leave them with you, to encourage and edify you:

"The longer we stay away from Reformed doctrine the longer we will see a decline in biblical knowledge and spirituality. We must see that Baptist heritage is strongly rooted in the Reformation which reclaimed Scripture from a pragmatic church. As we look around us today, we see that most Baptist churches (and for that matter the Evangelical church as a whole) are eaten up with pragmatism.[25] If we are going to see Reformation today, we must call ourselves back to our Reformed heritage. It has been Baptist theology that has had one of the most striking impacts in the world since the 1700's. But we must not allow a watered-down version of Baptist theology to stop our continual impact. If we are going to call ourselves Baptists, we must follow our forefathers in their pursuit of biblical purity to the orthodox Christian doctrines. We are a doctrinal people, a people who have flowed out of the Reformation to call a world to follow the Sovereign God who sent His Son to die on the cross for all who would believe! Let us begin this Reformation today!"

Blessings

 

John Owen,

I enjoyed your post.

I really did not call any attention to anything about the Westminster Confession, although I have a copy written by G.I. Williamson.

I should have researched John Owen first before making comment, but before you corrected me, I had already looked it up on a Search. Thanks for the correction.

And as for Pastor Larry he still has some distaste for me because his arguments were so weak and many cases pointless in trying to prove his five points of Calvinism. I would not swallow his error based on his feeble understanding of the Word of God. My brother in Christ will have to deal with those bad feelings.

Pastor Larry none of us are going to believe that a writer of a Christian book is going to deliberately try to use wrong documentation. Apart from any documentation he has clearly pointed out from Scripture that Almighty God is not the hateful God that some have portrayed Christ to be, One Who is more than ready to damn whoever He wants to send to eternal destruction.

Ray

 

Pastor Larry... I apologize for leading the thread to where it really need not have gone, or at least participating in the rabbit trail....
I just wanted to add some further info regarding Hunt and his book, and suddenly found myself defending my beliefs yet again... funny how that happens.... anyways....

blessings!