Kirkland: "Calvinism: None Dare Call It Heresy," Text, Part 6

Kirkland: "Calvinism: None Dare Call It Heresy," Text, Part 6
Monday, October 31, 2022 by Dr. James W. Walraven

Categories: Apologetics / Apostasy / Contemporary issues / God’s sovereignty / Scripture discussion / Spiritual deception / The church / Thought for Today

On our own, will we reason our way to faith? Kirkland seems to indicate that we can, that when we are confronted with the Gospel, we can reason out the truth of it. But, apart from God’s intervention, will we?

Romans 3:10–18 paints a very bleak picture of who we are in our natural spiritually dead state. For our purposes, verse 11 is key: “There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God” (KJV). If God, through Paul, is telling us that no one understands, that no one seeks after Him, who do we believe?

Kirkland maintains that we can reason our way to faith, reason our way to repentance. While we still can think and reason, that ability is now in bondage to sin. Adam and Eve reasoned their way into their deliberate free choice to sin. God tells us the post-Fall reality is that no one understands. If no one now understands, how do we manage to reason our way to faith? We can’t successfully reason about what we don’t understand. No one seeks after Him. Why? As John 3:19 tells us, “Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (KJV).

God tells us how that process works. The last half of Romans 1 details our plunge into ever deeper sin. The author is correct in that humans exercise reason and choice. Those choices are uniformly to reject God, that even knowing their choices and resulting actions deserve death, they not only do those things, but also approve of those who do them. Human reason isn’t used to come to faith in Christ, but to find justification for rejecting God, ultimately to invent new forms of evil.

Left to our own devices, we will not reason our way to faith. As Luther well described it, unlike Adam and Eve at creation, our will is in bondage to sin.

We still have a will, but we consistently choose to sin. The author does reference Joshua’s telling the people to choose who they will serve (page 65), emphasizing again the centrality of our choice. Yet nowhere does Kirkland discuss Moses’s comment to the people in Deuteronomy 29:4, “Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day” (KJV). We’ve discussed that same issue centuries later with God’s comment to Isaiah, a passage Jesus and Paul will both reference yet again, centuries later.

Scripture makes it clear that we must choose. The trouble is, apart from God’s intervention, we consistently make the wrong choice. There are numerous verses the author must ignore to maintain his thesis. On the other hand, as we continue to review the book, we will find places where hard-core Calvinists must themselves ignore many Scriptures to maintain their theological position. That is the reason I’m neither a Calvinist nor a free-will Arminian.

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