The Calvinist does not deny God’s part in knowledge or God’s part in sin. God does not cause us to sin. God is not the author of sin. But God could have not created sinful people. He himself chose to allow sin and then to punish that same sin. To deny this is to deny God’s omniscience and omnipotence.

We know God because we have the Bible. We might know God to a lesser degree in other ways (see Romans 1) but that knowledge never leads to life. Life only comes through faith, and faith only by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Christ himself invested his life in Scriptures, teaching from Scriptures, devoting himself to theology, the knowledge and study of God.

To suggest that theology is unimportant and devisive is to suggest that Christ himself walked in an unworthy manner. To suggest that theology is unimportant is to suggest that God’s thoughts and ways are really unimportant. Compare that with the Psalmist’s reflections: “How precious are your thoughts to me, Oh God. How vast are the sum of them” God’s thoughts are what theology is all about.

Which of us can say we love our wives if all we really want to do is to be like our wives? That’s crazy talk. We love our wives when we want to know our wives inside out – her thoughts, her manners, her habits, her desires, her likes and dislikes. That is how we know God. To love God is to keep his commandments, and we cannot know those commandments without knowing his thoughts, desires, likes and dislikes.

I could accept the latter, but I can’t the former. My concept of Theology is a formal study of God, and that isn’t sufficient for me (or it is my belief, anyhow) to relate to him; however, if that’s not what you mean then I’m not going to get hung up on verbage.

Honestly, there’s a lot of value in both the intellectual and the abandoning of the intellectual for the emotional. Jesus had great Theology (obviously) but it always flowed out of his very emotional, reckless love for people.

Moreover, we can know something on an emotional level and apply it subconsciously without every processing it intellectually. I have a friend who is incredibly wise and intuitive in spiritual matters (read, “all matters”), but she has less formal Bible instruction than most high schoolers who grew up in the Church–she was instructed almost exclusively through God’s spirit (or so I believe) and she lives a Godly life because of it. Very little of what she knows manifests itself intellectually, as opposed to emotionally.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. It does in my head anyways.

This is an interesting and important point. How often have you heard a preacher make a sermon out of Judges 2:10 “And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel”? They pontificate long and hard on our responsibility to train our children in the way of the Lord and point at this generation as absolute failures in training their children. But is it really so? Is it really that that old generation failed to tell their children about the Lord? The generation that preceded me told my generation all about the Lord, and yet a great many of my generation have turned away. Is it the older generation’s fault? For all their zeal and enthusiasm, for all their brow-beating and fear-mongering, did they not do enough to teach the new generation about the Lord?

I think the answer lies in the latter part of the verse: There not only arose a generation “which knew not the LORD” but also did not know “the works which he had done for Israel” — and why? Why did they not know? Because the Lord Himself didn’t see fit to do any works for that generation as he had for the previous generation. They didn’t know the Lord because the Lord didn’t speak to them as he had spoken to the previous generation.

So again, with the Amalekites. God commanded Saul to exterminate them for their ignorance of Himself. By why were they ignorant? Because He Himself had not seen fit to send them a Moses like he did the Israelites. Seems to me that both we as Christians, and the Lord Himself, need to own up to the fact that the Lord has let the modern generation slip by taking on an attitude that He doesn’t have to do any more miracles. Does he really think that a book is sufficient today when it clearly wasn’t sufficient at any point in the history of Israel? Of course a generation will arise that knows not the Lord when the Lord refuses to introduce himself to them personally.

I *just* had this same conversation with my pastor. Some theological debates have clear urgency (like Arminianism vs. Calvinism), but some seem to be pointless — for example, debates about which of the millennialist eschatological theories is most accurate (it feels like people are trying to “time” Christ’s coming).

My pastor convinced me that it is important to press into the theological issues and always try to understand more. But unless there is a clear and urgent practical application that demands judgment, I feel that we shouldn’t rush too quickly to take sides and claim a level of understanding that we don’t have. It seems there is a lot of that “premature certainty” in theological debates.

Of course, I am very much a beginner in these things, and frequently need correction. But at the moment, it seems that any theological debate must be justified by it’s applicability to a practical question.

Don’t waste time discussing Calvinism with this guy. He likes casting aspersions…

1) Those who assert that God is the author of sin are not Calvinists. They are hyper-Calvinists. The WCF states that God is not the author of sin. Whether Calvinists are logically consistent in denying that “God is the author of sin” while affirming “exhaustive determinism” is up to debate, but at least give them the credit for rejecting this blasphemous notion.

2) Arminianism is not to be loosely defined as any non-Calvinist. Hyper-Calvinism is neither Arminian nor Calvinist. Likewise, semi-Pelagianism is neither Arminian nor Calvinist.

3) Many Calvinistic Baptists (such as John MacArthur) believe that all babies who die go to heaven, regardless of whether their parents are believers.