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Will Calvinists Vote For Romney Or Sit The Election Out If He Is The Nominee?
12/19/11 | Tom Hawk

Posted on 12/19/2011 11:19:50 AM PST by Tom Hawks

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To: 5cents
If Ron Paul does not get elected as POTUS then we will continue our decrease into degeneracy and add to the assurance of His imminent return.

LOL, Paul will stop degeneracy? You mean the Paul who supported gays int he military and said that 'hetrosexuals are the real problem? Paul who voted against reaffirming In God We Trust as the national motto? Paul who thinks prostitution and drugs should be legalized and that the citizens can't set legal standards for common decency over the degenerates who want to enslave young girls or dump drugs on kids? Paul, who is fine if abortion is legal on the State level and voted against making it a crime to take a child across state lines for an abortion to avoid the other parent's input?

Paul is probably the second most degenerate politician of the bunch outside Obama.


61 posted on 12/20/2011 6:53:50 AM PST by mnehring
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To: jenk

ping 57 & 61


62 posted on 12/20/2011 6:56:37 AM PST by mnehring
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To: mnehring

#57 is their mindset. If Ron Paul isn’t elected, it won’t matter which Republican wins. That’s why I think he’ll go third party.


63 posted on 12/20/2011 12:23:43 PM PST by jenk (The country needs Sarah Palin and the Constitution.)
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To: Tom Hawks; All
I'm not sure how serious your question is, but if your point is that you see a difference on church-related websites regarding how different types of Christians will vote when confronted with a choice between two non-Christian candidates, you do have a point.

Unlike many broad evangelicals in modern America, Calvinists have historically had rather well-defined views on the role of a Christian civil magistrate and what Christians should do when we have non-Christian rulers. That's an important difference between classical Calvinism and the classic Lutheranism of Europe which largely took a hands-off attitude toward civil rulers, though American Lutherans are a different issue. More important for this debate today, it's a key difference between classical Calvinism and the disestablishment principles that underlie historic Baptist theology in the early United States.

(I'm well aware of the Southern “spirituality of the church” view and I'm deliberately avoiding it. That doctrine, whether right or wrong, simply is not the view of Calvin, Knox, the Westminster Assembly, Owen, Cromwell, or the Covenanters, let alone the Reformed colonists of New England or the Calvinist minorities in the middle states who included some key leaders among the Founding Fathers. It's also very different from the views of modern politically active Calvinists such as Kuyper and Schaeffer.)

Classical as well as modern Calvinist views on politics can fairly be summed up by the famous statements of Abraham Kuyper, who a century ago was a Dutch prime minister and founder of a university, a major Protestant secession, a daily newspaper, and other key cultural institutions which for a half-century formed a bulwark against gathering European liberalism and until World War II made the Netherlands the Bible Belt of Europe. (The collapse of those institutions during World War II was a key factor in the Dutch theological collapse that led to liberalism and the wholesale decline of Dutch churches and Dutch civil life into the gross immorality the country has today.)

One of Kuyper’s famous statements was that not one inch of God's world is free from the crown rights of King Jesus. Sorting out the details of that gets complicated and there's a lot of important nuances, but the general principle is close to universal in historic Calvinist theology when applied to politics. Calvinism presumes that the Bible tells us how to run our government, though not necessarily in exhaustive detail. That view was not shared by Luther, and it definitely was not shared by the early American Baptists who fought for disestablishment and whose appeal to Thomas Jefferson generated his famous “separation of church and state” letter.

However, it would be a mistake to say that Calvinists have views on this issue of a hypothetical Romney-Obama race which are clear-cut, or which are clearly different from Arminians. There was a day that dispensational Arminians, for example, might care very little about “worldly affairs” such as secular politics and be accused by Calvinists of having a “world flight mentality,” but that is not an accurate statement today.

In the modern era, Francis Schaeffer’s views, as well as those of Dr. D. James Kennedy, had a tremendous impact on broadly evangelical Christians on the abortion issue, and that impact went far beyond Calvinism to provide the theological underpinnings of much of the modern Christian right. When a politically active Pentecostal pastor is preaching on the need for his members to apply biblical principles to all of life, not merely what they do in their homes and churches, that pastor may be totally unaware that by repeating something he's heard Pat Robertson say on the 700 Club, he's actually taking a fundamental point of Reformed theology which Robertson took from Schaeffer. The same can be said for a Southern Baptist pastor who is repeating things he's heard from Jerry Falwell which have very little in common with historic Baptist views on disestablishment.

As Calvinists, it's a lot harder for us to say we should vote for the lesser of two evils. For us, this is not a pragmatic but a principial question.

Those of us Calvinists who are politically active and know our historic Calvinist theology of politics know we're supposed to have Christian civil magistrates who will apply the Bible to all of life, while obeying evil rulers insofar as they do not command us to violate God's law. If I have to decide between Romney or Obama, I have to decide whether I want to replace a supporter of black liberation theology with a cultist who believes in a radical view of free will and denies anything even close to a biblical view of total depravity.

Both are horrible choices, and I can't see this choice as one merely of pragmatism.

I hope I don't have to make a selection between those two choices, but if I do, we as Americans cannot say that our sins and wickedness have not provoked God more than enough to abandon us to that choice.

64 posted on 12/30/2011 2:30:39 PM PST by darrellmaurina
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