What Is Hyper-Calvinism?

00:00:00.000 | What is hyper-Calvinism and how do we avoid it? It's a question from a

00:00:08.680 | listener named Andrew. Hello Pastor John and thank you for this podcast. In the

00:00:13.040 | wake of your helpful new book, Coronavirus and Christ, one theologian

00:00:16.880 | said of you, "Piper's thinking is sometimes Calvinism raised to the nth

00:00:22.080 | power. That's not where it belongs." I disagree. I think that's exactly

00:00:28.280 | where it belongs. An elevated and consistent Calvinism maintained

00:00:32.280 | throughout one's entire ministry from private devotions to the pulpit and into

00:00:37.040 | those rare moments when the Christian is called to speak into current events. For

00:00:41.920 | your model of consistency, I thank God. As for myself, I was recently called a

00:00:46.520 | hyper-Calvinist by someone online for something I said. There's no need to go

00:00:50.700 | into exactly what I said. I simply want to know from you, what is a hyper-Calvinist?

00:00:54.920 | Is that what you're being accused of? When does Calvinism go wrong? How do we

00:01:00.120 | sustain our strong Calvinistic convictions to the nth degree without

00:01:05.080 | slipping into hyper-Calvinism? Pastor John, what would you say? Let me state the

00:01:10.160 | absolutely crucial thing here first and then back up to the specific question

00:01:18.600 | and then circle back again at the end and end on the absolutely crucial thing.

00:01:24.400 | So, in my judgment, the absolutely crucial thing is that we submit all of our

00:01:30.160 | thinking to what the Bible teaches—all of the Bible. Not just select parts of it,

00:01:36.360 | but all of it, rightly understood—the whole counsel of God. And when I say

00:01:45.160 | submit our thinking to what the Bible teaches, I include bringing our thinking

00:01:52.320 | into biblical balance as well as biblical truthfulness. Wherever someone

00:01:58.480 | stands on any issue, it is possible to emphasize that issue to the exclusion of

00:02:06.000 | other issues. And in that sense, any issue may become a hyper-issue, meaning an

00:02:14.640 | over-emphasis on some part of the Bible that silences other important parts of

00:02:22.280 | the Bible. That's hyper—hyper-anything. So that's the absolutely crucial thing.

00:02:27.800 | Believe and teach what the whole Bible, rightly understood, teaches, and believe

00:02:35.040 | it and teach it in biblical proportion, biblical balance, so that no scripture is

00:02:42.360 | used to silence the meaning and importance of other scriptures. So now to

00:02:50.800 | the specific question, what is hyper-Calvinism? I think probably the most

00:02:57.320 | common historic meaning for the term is that hyper-Calvinism refers to a

00:03:05.240 | distortion of historic Calvinism, and the distortion says—remember now, I'm reading a

00:03:12.760 | distortion—the distortion says it is inappropriate and unbiblical to invite

00:03:20.780 | people to Christ unless they give some evidence of being among the elect. That's

00:03:27.360 | a distortion, that's a falsehood. And the net effect of this viewpoint is to put a

00:03:34.440 | governor on the indiscriminate preaching of the gospel and the wholehearted

00:03:39.920 | engagement in world missions. You can hear it in the voice of a preacher who

00:03:45.500 | when William Carey wanted to go to India said, "Sit down, young man, when God wants

00:03:50.080 | to reach the nations, he'll do it without your help." In other words, don't you go

00:03:53.600 | out there and preach the gospel indiscriminately to those pagans? You

00:03:56.600 | might, you know, tempt somebody to embrace the gospel when they're not

00:03:59.880 | elect. That's hyper-Calvinism. In other words, the emphasis is put so

00:04:06.080 | completely on the unconditional election of God and the spiritual deadness of man

00:04:13.840 | and the sovereignty of grace in conversion, all of which are true. The

00:04:19.120 | emphasis is put so heavily on those three that the irrational and unbiblical

00:04:27.040 | inference is drawn, namely, that we should not say to any non-elect person who's

00:04:35.960 | spiritually dead, "Repent, believe, come to Christ." We should never preach like that.

00:04:41.560 | We should never indiscriminately say to a whole crowd of people, many of whom

00:04:45.720 | would be non-elect, "Come to Christ, repent, believe." Now the reason I say that's

00:04:50.880 | irrational and unbiblical, to draw that inference from election and deadness and

00:04:58.760 | sovereign grace, is this. It's irrational because nothing in reason says that

00:05:07.160 | summoning a spiritually dead sinner to repent might not be the means God uses

00:05:16.280 | to perform the miracle of making him alive, and thus demonstrating he is elect.

00:05:22.240 | And I say it's unbiblical because the Bible tells us, "Preach the gospel to

00:05:30.600 | everyone, and the sheep will hear the shepherd's voice in the preaching and

00:05:38.520 | follow him." John 10:27. So our job is not to know ahead of time who the sheep are.

00:05:47.360 | Our job is to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ, pray for converting

00:05:54.520 | power, and plead for people to repent and trust God. Trust him to do his

00:06:02.280 | regenerating work. God raises the dead. He raises the dead, and he grants faith, and

00:06:10.240 | he does it through preaching. So we're supposed to say precisely to dead bones,

00:06:16.280 | "Live! Live! Why would you die?" That's the way we should preach indiscriminately to

00:06:22.640 | all people, offering the gospel to everyone and trusting God to call his

00:06:27.000 | own. Now, here's another contemporary form of hyper-Calvinism that is common among

00:06:34.640 | some Reformed groups. Just like the old hyper-Calvinism was hesitant to offer

00:06:42.720 | gospel salvation to someone who might not be elect, so this contemporary form

00:06:50.280 | of hyper-Calvinism is hesitant to offer gospel assurance to professing

00:06:56.600 | Christians who might not be elect. Now, I had a conversation with a man who held

00:07:03.160 | this view recently in one of my trips, and my conclusion was this. He so

00:07:09.520 | emphasized the danger of giving false assurance to possibly fake Christians

00:07:17.400 | that he preached in such a way as to withhold true assurance from real

00:07:24.160 | Christians. That's how a good concern becomes a hyper-concern. And you

00:07:30.840 | can smell it, because the tone of the congregation is not the tone of Romans

00:07:36.580 | 8, which is so radically bent on helping Christians be gloriously bold in their

00:07:44.760 | assurance that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. So those

00:07:51.560 | are two forms of hyper-Calvinism, and the way to avoid both of them is Bible,

00:07:59.440 | Bible, Bible. The whole Bible, unashamed, uncompromising, in biblical balance. So my

00:08:09.960 | response to somebody who says, "Piper takes his Calvinism to the nth degree,

00:08:16.000 | nth power," my response to that would be to say, "Well, nth degree has no meaning to

00:08:24.560 | me. It has no content. You can't know if it's true. I can't know if it's true or

00:08:32.200 | false, what they're saying, because it doesn't carry any meaning." The

00:08:37.080 | question is, does Piper submit his so-called Calvinism to the Bible? Does he

00:08:45.800 | bring it into alignment with the truth of the whole Bible? Does he bring it into

00:08:51.240 | balance with the way the Bible teaches the sovereignty of God? Does Piper—here

00:08:57.280 | are the key questions, and I invite everybody to ask them of me and of

00:09:01.400 | everything I've ever said—does Piper silence important biblical teachings by

00:09:07.720 | his Calvinism? Does Piper silence the responsibility of man? Does he silence

00:09:15.040 | the reality of secondary causes like Satan and sinful man in the suffering

00:09:21.480 | and sin of the world? Does he silence the reality of the Holy Spirit and that the

00:09:26.680 | Holy Spirit can be grieved, or that Jesus wept over Jerusalem? Does he silence the

00:09:32.880 | biblical reality that we should hold our hands out to a world bent on destruction

00:09:38.800 | and plead with them with tears to repent? If Piper uses his Calvinism to silence

00:09:46.760 | truth, true and important biblical teachings, then Piper is moving into

00:09:53.120 | hyper-Calvinism. Now whether that's happening is not helped or clarified at

00:09:59.320 | all by saying Piper's Calvinism is to the nth degree. What use is that? But

00:10:06.840 | here's where the rubber meets the road. It often comes down to being thoroughly

00:10:11.840 | biblical versus silencing Scripture with philosophical assumptions. The modern

00:10:19.200 | world operates with the philosophical assumption that human willpower has the

00:10:26.000 | capacity for ultimate, final, decisive self-determination in the moment of

00:10:34.720 | conversion to Christ. That is the reigning modern philosophical assumption.

00:10:42.600 | When I say modern, I mean say two, three hundred years. Whatever divine influences

00:10:48.120 | there are, the modern world says we, we humans, provide the final, ultimate,

00:10:56.240 | decisive cause in our conversion to Christ. That assumption, then, is brought

00:11:04.880 | to the Bible. It's not found in the Bible. You can't find that assumption anywhere

00:11:09.680 | in the Bible. That assumption, that assertion, is brought to the Bible and it

00:11:16.280 | causes many people to call Calvinism hyper-Calvinism. By labeling it

00:11:23.440 | hyper-Calvinism, by labeling ordinary Bible-balanced Calvinism hyper-Calvinism,

00:11:31.040 | you can blow smoke over the clear biblical reality that there is no such

00:11:36.320 | thing in the Bible or in the world as ultimate, final, decisive human

00:11:42.000 | self-determination in conversion to Christ. So we end back where we started

00:11:47.480 | with the main thing. Bible, Bible, Bible. Not philosophy, not philosophy, not

00:11:54.280 | assumptions, not modern American love affair with free will. No, no, no. Bible,

00:12:00.240 | Bible, Bible. Not modern assumptions, not the darling of human self-determination

00:12:07.680 | in conversion, but Bible, the whole counsel of God in biblical proportion.

00:12:14.960 | Amen. The Bible and all of it. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening.

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00:12:32.920 | us, do that online at Zaringod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:12:38.440 | Well, recessions are killjoys. They destroy small businesses, they disrupt life, they

00:12:44.200 | take away our normalcy, and they seem to cost us our happiness. Or do they? So what

00:12:50.560 | has God up to in this recession? We'll find out by reviewing what John Pepper

00:12:54.040 | said in the last recession. With that, we're back on Wednesday. Until then, I'm

00:12:58.480 | Tony Reinke. We'll see you next time.

00:13:02.280 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

What Is Hyper-Calvinism?

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