REGRESSIVE CALVINISM

By Eric Kemp

Disagreement is the spice of life. When the goals are shared, people who disagree with one another on how to accomplish the goals can act as a necessary opposing force from going too far off in one direction. Politically, our two-party system is supposed to do just that. Ecclesiastically, the different parts of Christ’s body make us whole.

However, there are many within our political system who do not see those whom they disagree with as sharing common goals. Instead, the person across the aisle is morally deficient, a bad person. There is no common cause with a bad person. These forces seek to drag our politics down, to regress us back, into a power struggle for who is the better person and therefore gets to force the other bad person to sit down and be quiet. We see this every time there is a national conversation on the issues that plague our nation. Unfortunately, I think we are seeing the same thing in the Body of Christ.

The term “Regressive Left” is used to describe those on the far left of the political spectrum who seek to set America back on issues such as human rights and free speech. The term used for those people on the right is the “alt-right” but they are every bit as regressive.

There is a growing “Regressive Calvinism” which seeks to set the Church back in terms of character, scholarship, and rhetoric. This regressive rot within Calvinism was on full display in the recent free will debate between Dr. Leighton Flowers/Dr. Johnathan Pritchett and Dr. Sonny Hernandez/Dr. Theodore Zachariades. The previously agreed upon question of the debate was supposed to be “What is the Biblical View of Free Will?” but it quickly became clear that Hernandez/Zachariades team was instead hard determinists who did not believe in free will of any kind.

In this article, I will not be discussing the differing points of theology in the debate. I will leave that endeavor to more qualified men. I will, instead, be looking at the style, structure, and depth of the argumentation. I will argue that not only were Dr. Hernandez and Dr. Zacharadius unprepared for the debate, but they were wholly uninterested in understanding their opponent’s position. During opening statements, the Calvinists stated their position as true without explanation or argumentation. It seems that the only defense of their truth claims was how loudly they stated them. Further, as I will hopefully be able to show, while the reaction of many Calvinists was one of disapproval of the tone of the debate, there is at least one popular Calvinist resource that celebrated it.

DR. HERNANDEZ’S OPENING
“I believe my opponent’s position, tonight, stands on Tradition and not truth. And I will explain to you why…”

But he does not. Several minutes later in his opening statement, Dr. Hernandez rightly quotes Dr. Flowers’ definition of libertarian free will, “The ability to refrain or not refrain from a given moral action“. I felt buoyed by the accuracy of the quote and thought that we were going to get down to the meat of the disagreement. Unfortunately, Dr. Hernandez goes a different direction: “Now let me explain something to you that is very important OK? Flowers position has more in common with Catholicism than it does with Christ“. Then he goes on to quote Roman Catholic catechism and concludes, “This is not language from heaven, but lies from hell“.

My Calvinist brethren, hear me, even if you factually agree with Dr. Hernandez, his argument is synonymous with every internet argument that ends with an accusation of being like Hitler. It’s a bogeyman fallacy followed up by impassioned polemics and elevated volume. Dr. Hernandez had ten minutes to explain how his position differed from those who affirm free will and he had no more depth than an internet crusader.

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