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The Trouble With Calvin – Pt. 1 Over my next five blog posts, I am going to critique the famous “five points” of Calvinist theology: 1. Total Depravity 2. Unconditional Election 3. Limited Atonement 4. Irresistibility of Grace 5. Perseverance of the Saints (“Once Saved, Always Saved”).Pt. 1 – Total DepravityIn John Calvin’s magnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin presents a view of man that is very much like Luther’s, but contrary to what we find in the pages of Sacred Scripture. Calvin used texts like Gen.6:5,The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great...

Total Depravity means that sin has touched all of what a person is. In the unbeliever this means that his intellect is now corrupted by falsehood. His speech no longer brings glory to God. His motives are selfish instead of pure. His character is stained and corrupted. Furthermore, the doctrine of total depravity does not teach that the person is as bad as he can be, or that he always does the worst possible thing. Instead, it teaches that all parts and passions of the person have been touched by sin and are affected by sin. It means that our...

The best outline for demonstrating this thesis is provided by the words of my previous sentence themselves: “Protestantism”, “seed”, and “barren harvest”. An examination of each of these in turn will reveal the true horror of last year’s ecumenical agape. Hopefully, this article will be helpful in teaching Catholics that truly progressive men interested in the real benefit of mankind must forever band together to reject Protestantism and the barren seed that it sows. It is essential to begin by insisting that I am not anathematizing Protestants as individuals. Men are always difficult quantities with whom to deal. Even Luther,...

Does being totally depraved mean we're always sinning no matter what? Yes. Romans 14:23 says, "Whatever is not from faith is sin." And so you don't even need total depravity. You just need unbelief in order to say that everything a person does who is not a believer is sin. Maybe another word on that. Why is that the case? If you have a son, and you want him to do something, and he does the thing-like unbelievers don't usually kill people, OK? So they're obeying that commandment, "Don't kill," but why are they doing that? Are they doing it...

That's right. John Piper is Bad. See the video here.

PREDESTINATION seems to cast a shadow on the very heart of human freedom. If God has decided our destinies from all eternity, that strongly suggests that our free choices are but charades, empty exercises in predetermined playacting. It is as though God wrote the script for us in concrete and we are merely carrying out his scenario. To get a handle on the puzzling relationship between predestination and free will, we must first define free will. That definition itself is a matter of great debate. Probably the most common definition says free will is the ability to make choices without...