Why I'm Not a Calvinist - Pt 1 : Humans Are Inherently Good

A chat about human nature, the nature of sin, and why it all matters

This series has been a long time coming.

And I want to make sure there is a lot of space for back and forth, addressing some questions and thoughts as we go along - something I have a few ideas for.

Let’s get into it.

A Recovering Calvinist?

I grew up as a reformed baptist - as Calvinistic ( when it came to soteriology - the doctrine of salvation ) as they come. I was all in. Hook, line, and sinker.

For what we’re discussing in this series, it’s probably best to lay out, very broadly, what I held to. Most folks who are familiar with Calvinism, even at a distant or cursory level, have heard of TULIP.

The five points of Calvinist soteriology as a pithy little acronym.

Total Depravity

Unconditional Election

Limited Atonement

Irresistible Grace

Perseverance of the Saints.

Those are the core ideas of the vast majority of Calvinists today - and those are the core ideas that I once held, but now, through time and study, have come to reject. And it does take time. For a while, even though I was theologically and philosophically, and even pragmatically, convinced that TULIP was not it, I still had that framework - that perspective. For ages I would read passages and have old views in the back of my mind, I’d have those previous definitions swirling. I was, for all intents and purposes, a recovering Calvinist. I wanted out, could see the light, but would have some relapses in thinking and reasoning and living.

That’s because Calvinism is a big theological framework.

No Such Thing as a Silver Bullet

People often ask me for “my best argument against Calvinism”, or “cite a verse that topples the Calvinist viewpoint.” But that isn’t how this works. And, sadly, it betrays a lack of understanding in what it takes to change a worldview. Worldviews are these massive structural perspectives for how we engage in the world around us - if one could topple the Calvinistic worldview ( or vice verse ) with a verse or syllogism, it’d have been done by now, by folk much smarter than me. What it takes is genuine engagement with other ideas and worldviews, with real understanding, and to let those concepts interact and settle within us. For me, I gained “eyes to see” as I read varieties of scholars from varying theological backgrounds during my masters. Prior to that, my theological exposure was hyper-calvinistic ( see what I did there ? ). I was catechized on the Calvinists, given formation literature from a Calvinist perspective, and every theological tome or commentary I interacted with was Calvinistic.

But when you get to the deep scholastic world, you can’t only read Calvinists - you need to read everyone, experts in their fields, and see how they process the biblical data, how they put together the theological meta-narrative, and how they answer certain, often perplexing, questions.

As I did that, I found myself taken aback - their view seemed more consistent, and answered the questions I had with much greater ease, and a lot less theological and philosophical haphazardry. I wanted to learn more, see more, understand more, and rebuild my own worldview to reflect that which seemed more consistent.

So let’s get into what is probably the best place to start:

Humans Are Good?

As with all things, there are lots of assumptions that go into what we believe - these things we tend to call “presuppositions”, things we believe to be true, foundationally. These presuppositions influence how we understand everything around us, they shape and guide our perspective. I’m going to give a line of thinking, and define stuff as we go, so that you can set your presuppositions aside. If you’re genuinely interested in this conversation, you’re going to have to learn to hear and listen and understand.

So, let’s start with a kind of thinking experiment / train of thought to get this whole thing started :

Do you think that God made everything ?

Pretty simple question, because the idea of Christianity is that God is the Creator and Source of everything that is. So yes, God made all of Creation.

Next question :

Does God only create Good things ?

Also, seems pretty simple. God calls His creation Good ( to be defined in a moment ) in Genesis.

Can God create evil or sinful things ?

Maybe a bit trickier. Theologically we would have to say no. God cannot make evil or sinful things - He is only Good and the source of all Goodness. What He makes is Good - ontologically - as its being.

Did God make humans ?

You bet He did.

Are humans Good ?

Yes - at least how God made them.

But let’s discuss a bit of this Goodness and a bit of this nature of being - because we do need to be extra clear on this. When we talk about Goodness, especially in Genesis, we’re talking a few things. First, we’re talking about nature - what a human is. God made humans, so part of our nature is to have our source in Him - and exist according to His grace. On top of that, there are ways of thinking and feeling and acting, certain powers, that are essential to being human. God calls those things Good. It is Good that He made us to be in relationship and depend on Him. It’s Good that He gave us the powers and capacities to think and feel and will and act. All of this is where we derive human value - being made in His image. When we talk of Good, we are talking about our substance and state of being, primarily. We’re talking about nature.

Morality, doing the Good, is a bit different, so let’s get into that.

What is sin ?

This gets a bit tougher than the previous questions, but we need to consider it when we have this discussion. Sin, at its fundamental level, is a privation. That’s just a fancy way of saying that sin is actually the absence of something. Picture it like this :

Dark does not exist. It is not a substance ( and I know, dark matter etc - but that’s not the same thing lol ). Dark isn’t a particle. You can’t get a bit of dark on you. It does’t exist. Dark is the absence of light.

Sin is the exact same.

Sin doesn’t exist - it is, by definition, the absence of the Goodness of God.

Sins are acts of the will that are not Good, not True, and not Beautiful. God is the source of those, and therefore sins are comprised of anything that are oriented away from God. Sins are a deliberate choice away from God, ultimately.

Putting it Together

All of this, this train of thought, gets us to a particular place. We have the idea that God is Good and only makes Good things - humans are included in that. Our Goodness is our state of being - our nature. Imagers.

Sin, we have said, is not a state of being. It doesn’t have substance. It isn’t a thing. If you want to think it is a thing, I can’t stop you, but that’s essentially the heresy of dualism.

That means that sin cannot, by definition, be in or on us at all times.

Let’s take a second to process that.

I’m saying that the image of God cannot be lost, and that sin cannot “reside within us” because it isn’t a state of being; it isn’t a substance, it doesn’t have an essence. The theological and philosophical ways of saying this are :

Sin, evil, doesn’t exist as an entity - it has no existential or ontological existence. It wasn’t created, it is a perversion of creation.

What Happened At the Fall ?

That’s the next logical question, right ?

Well, first off, everything was made Good. There are not evil creations - not even Satan. Satan was, originally, a Good creation - an angel. Satan chose evil, by his free will. He chose to reject and rebel against the Order and Goodness and Truth and Beauty of God. I digress.

Take the story of Adam and Eve.

They are made Good, in God’s image. They then, by their free will, choose to reject God’s way, desiring to become their own gods. That was their sin, and that is where sin “exists” - by their free will and in their actions, or dispositions. God made them with powers, like we said, to be able to think and feel and emote and act, and they used those powers, freely, to choose against the Goodness of the cosmos.

The result?

Humanity is cast out from Eden, from the presence of God.

And herein lies the consequences for all of humanity.

Sin, still, does not have being. It didn’t turn into a substance at the Fall.

That means our being, who we are, cannot be fundamentally sinful. We retain the image of God, and remember what that entails : Him as source, dependant upon His grace, and having these essential qualities, thinking or feeling or acting, that make us human.

That is what remains, and that is what God has called Good.

We are still imagers, and that’s Good.

But, that’s not everything.

We are removed from the presence of God, we pushed God away - and so removed from His grace, we are deeply inclined to choose sin. Our nature is still Good in the sense that we are made by God and retain the Good qualities and value He gave us, but now, more than ever, we desire to use those qualities and powers to turn away from Him and all Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Different folk in Christianity have different terminology for that last paragraph - but the fundamental idea behind it this :

Leaving God’s presence is a losing of Grace.

I would say, even in the Garden, Adam and Eve chose Good ( previous to the fall ) by Grace - all of True Life is of Grace. Once that Grace is gone, by our pushing it away, we are faced with all the temptations to reject God without the added sustaining Grace. But we, ultimately, make those choices, towards evil, by our own Free Will.

Add to that the idea that there are, as Christians believe, there are forces who seek to tempt us away from the Good, and we can see what the biblical writers maintain that it is inevitable that we will sin.

Why Does This Matter ?

This line of thinking was revolutionary for my leaving Calvinism. The Calvinist idea of Total Depravity, as generally understood, is that man, by nature, has been corrupted by sin, that our wills are in bondage to sin ( aka, sin as a substance ), and that man’s heart is only evil all the time. Even, many say, after conversion, even our righteous acts are nothing but filthy rags.

That’s what the man himself, Calvin, said - even those who have been justified

“cannot perform one work which, if judged on its own merits, is not deserving of condemnation.”

Whew.

There are many reasons to reject this view.

First, I think that it turns sin into a substance. That’s a big mistake.

Second, I think it devalues the person. As in, if our intrinsic value and worth comes from God calling us Good, as His Imagers, if we lose that, and are no longer Good, there too goes our value and worth. But that value and worth are foundational not only for biblical ethics but even cultural and social ethics.

Third, this view skews all sorts of biblical idea and forces people to believe all sorts of weird things; it completely flattens texts and steamrolls them into saying particular things that they don’t actually say. The view I put forward ( seems ) to be consistent across all texts, allowing for the fullness of the biblical data to remain coherent.

Let me share an example.

If your will is sinful, and everything you desire, by nature, is evil - you have zero freedom to choose to do Good. You are doomed. This is fatalism and determinism ( and compatibilism ). But since you were essentially programmed to do evil, and could never do anything but evil, are you at fault for it ? Are you culpable ?Are you responsible for that evil ? Should you pay the price for it ?

I don’t think so.

Who determines, or ordains, that some people do evil ?

Is it God ? Calvin thinks so.

“Evildoers do not commit acts of depravity in spite of the command of God, but because of the command of God.”

And, further, if sin is a substance, who made it ?

Is God the source of sin ? Does God ordain sin ?

All very significant questions.

Let me explain one last thing, because I know it will come up.

Just because humans are inherently Good doesn’t mean they deserve heaven. Every human who has ever existed, and who will ever exist, has sinned. They have rejected God and His presence and His Grace and His Life. We are all in need of salvation from the consequences of that sin, Death.

The view I’m detailing doesn’t mean people don’t need saving - that would be a very faulty conclusion.

So….

That was step one in my thinking and reasoning my way out of being a Calvinist, a beginning of the undoing of Total Depravity. And my take is, if that falls away, the rest of it does too.

Anyways.

This was a lot - and definitely requires more conversation and dialogue.

If you have questions, post them below, and I’m going to compile them for future posts.