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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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They’re Calvinists. It’s gonna be a rough day for the religion teacher when classes resume (assuming anyone in a mainline Protestant denomination even believes that stuff anymore).

So, I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make. If it's "Calvinists believe in predestination, hence have no answer for the problem of evil", I have to say that's incorrect, to put it mildly. I mean, the first of the five points of Calvinism is "Total Depravity", essentially that man is so corrupted by original sin that he cannot choose any good apart from the grace of God.

If the point is "Religion claims that if you pray enough, bad things won't happen to you", I don't think that's a mainstream position among any Christian denominations.

If it’s “Calvinists believe in predestination, hence have no answer for the problem of evil”

Essentially this. “Total depravity” isn’t real answer to the problem of evil. It’s a fake answer. Why did God choose to make man totally depraved? To be fair, there is no monotheistic religion with a robust answer to the problem of evil, but the Catholic/Arminian “God decided that it was better to give mankind true free will, even if some men use it for evil,” answer could at least explain this. What are the Calvinists going to say? “Your friend Hallie died in a pool of her own blood so that God could demonstrate the need for his divine grace”?

Apparently Covenant Presbyterian Nashville is a PCA church, so they might actually teach some Calvinism. (The PCUSA is the "mainline" liberal demonination whose median member wouldn't know the first thing about predestination.)

In my experience it's not that they 'don't believe' it as much as they are not even familiar with concepts like predestination. Typically, they get angry and confused when you bring it up

Whoops.

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