Thank you, Mark Shea. Part 2.

As a New Years encore, Mark Shea offers this post on the Calvinist mindset.

A few excerpts:

FWIW, I'm not sure what problem, if any, Mr. Spencer has with my remark, which is largely a description of my own experience trying to figure out how to square Calvinist rhetoric of "irresistible grace" and "eternal security" and similar nonsense ideas with actual human experience. I don't come from a Calvinist background (unlike, say, Scott Hahn or Jimmy Akin) and my encounter with Calvinism was a most unhappy affair. I have grown more patient with it precisely because of my encounters with Catholics who are former Calvinists who see some good in it. Scott once described it as "Monotheism come of age" and added that "Catholicism is *trinitarian* monotheism come of age." I think there's a real insight in that remark.

And:

My encounter with Calvinism came through the good offices of Gary North, whose cocky arrogance and insouciant "tough luck for you, you unelect loser" attitude raised huge and terrifying questions for this neurotic who had stumbled into Christianity through the Evangelical tradition with its strong strain of Arminian emphasis on free will.

And:

The Calvinist guy, trying his best to remain true to the Calvinist diagram of reality, replied, "I don't know." He had to say this, because the Calvinist system demands it, and for a true Calvinist, the System trumps suspiciously touch-feely stuff like the Love of God. If you are Elect, then yes, God loves you. If not, then you're screwed. And since no man's destiny is known this side of heaven, we can never say for certain of anyone that God loves them. So to the hungry soul Calvinism perforce must reply "I don't know if God loves you" and then deliver a rebuke to "feelings based Christianity" if the hungry soul bleats in protest at this icy and inhuman diagram.

And:

At this point it is customary for the Calvinist to reply with a homily condemning faith based on experience instead of on the Unshakable Word of God. This is sleight of hand, of course. Because words like "assurance" and "security" are appeals to subjectivity, not objectivity. They *demand* you have a particular experience and they condemn you for having some other experience that doesn't confirm the doctrine of eternal secuity and assurance of Salvation. And the strange brew of Evangelicalism, which constantly muddles appeals to subjective experience with The Objective Truth of the Word of GOD gives the average person very little help in such struggles. When somebody does sin or apostatize, the solution tends to be "Oh, that person wasn't *really* a Christian". The apotheosis of this kind of dodge was something my pal Sherry Weddell heard in a class on the Holocaust she took many moons ago. The teacher read a virulently anti-semitic passage from a writer and asked the students in the class if this was Christian. The Evangelicals all confidently declared that whoever has said it "wasn't really a Christian". The author, of course, was Martin Luther. "You're telling me Martin Luther wasn't really a Christian?"

I can't speak for others, but my way out of the impasse was via Chesterton who described Calvinism as, variously, a form of devil worship (sacrificing the doctrine of God as Love to the doctrine of God as Omnipotent Power) and as a sort of madness which supremely sought to subjugate God to Reason and became, in the process, one of those little systems of order by which the madman loses everything except his reason.

I had a similar encounter with the Calvinists at Beggars All. In this thread the idea that "God is love" and that "God wills the salvation of all men" is treated by the resident Calvinists as a threatening bit of heresy, although both ideas are exact quotes from the New Testament. And this thread shows the way that Calvinists have to sacrifice key portions of the Gospel to that of "God as Omnipotent Power" becomes obvious, particularly in the comments around my post at 7:00 pm.