When I was conversing with Charlie, I can tell you, he seemed to me to be a deeply unhappy man. I have no doubt he would call his attitude one of “contending for the truth,” but he just seemed really irascible and argumentative.

Anyone who did not share his view of complete, no-quarter divine hatred for the non-elect was potentially suspect of being a “first-order” or “second-order” heretic (his words). A “first-order” heretic was not a Christian. A “second-order” one (which is what he called me)…. well, I still haven’t completely figured out that one.

Thank you for the response and the helpful information. My conversation partner (his name was Charlie) flatly denied that God shows *any* true favor or mercy to the non-elect. Charlie stated that any apparent blessings from God to the non-elect are simply God’s way of providing more reason to ultimately pour out His wrath on them (given that they would not truly thank God for said blessings).

Charlie gave me links to articles from the Protestant Reformed Churches of America to “prove” his points. I mentioned to him that the PRCA is often considered to be a hyper-Calvinist denomination (or very close to it), and he denied it, claiming that they were actually being faithful to the *true* historic Reformed tradition, when most other Reformed churches have supposedly “betrayed” it.

I wouldn’t call what you are describing a necessary characteristic of hyper-Calvinism. The mentality that you mention could just as easily be found in many completely non-Calvinist churches.

Some Christians simply refuse to employ reasoning and logic when they speak to non-Christians about Christ. These Christians (mistakenly) think that to do so would be using the “wisdom of the world.” They forget that reason and logic have to be employed in the reading and understanding of the Bible itself.

They of course realize two things:
1. Kids who claim to be atheist and the bible a fairy tale will ignore you.
2. Jesus and the Christians of the first century or two seemed to do OK without a NT. Or even a KJV OT.

Yes, your dialogue partner likely was a hyper-Calvinist. I think we can admit that the expression “common grace” is problematic without trashing the three points. Prior to Kuyper et al we used to speak simply of “providence” or “general providence.” That’s perhaps a more helpful terminology. We’ve always recognized that God gifts all humans with good gifts and restrains evil and grants mercies to all his creatures. The denial of these doctrines is really rooted in an over-realized eschatology (again part of the fundamentalist system). The substance of the three points has been present in Reformed Christianity since the 16th century.

If you want to see a defense of one of the three points, see the essay in David VanDrunen ed. The Pattern of Sound Doctrine on “Janus and the Well-Meant Offer….” The essay shows that Hoeksema, G. Clark (no relation) and others who deny the WMO do so because they are rationalists. Ironically they actually agree with Arminius in their rejection of the fundamental Reformed distinction between knowing things as God does (which we call “archetypal theology”) and knowing as humans do (ectypal theology). We are analogues of God, not God. This is an important fact that too many Reformed folk either don’t know (because they’ve simply pasted the doctrine of predestination to their fundamentalism without bothering to actually learn Reformed theology) or because they know about it and reject it in favor of an intersection between the divine and human intellects.

That old liberal Cornelius Van Til defended the TA/TE distinction (he called it “the Creator/creature distinction”) vigorously.

Mike Horton does a great job with this in Covenant and Eschatology.

Actually, the “Reformed” man told me that it was at the Synod Kalamazoo that the Christian Reformed Church supposedly “betrayed” the historical Reformed tradition by adopting the doctrine of common grace.

It was extremely frustrating to dialogue with him, because he denied that the concepts of common grace and divine love for the non-elect could be found *anywhere* in Reformed theology until Abraham Kuyper. I showed the man passages to the contrary from Calvin’s works (and most importantly, from the Bible itself!), and he just countered with other passages of Calvin, taken out of their wider context, which “proved” his theology.

I sincerely think that he was and is a hyper-Calvinist, though he denied it and called into question my own belief in Reformed soteriology. It was a long conversation that I probably allowed to go on for too long, hoping that I could reason with him…

Mike Horton has a term for folks like that. He says they’re in the “cage phase.” People discover the doctrines of grace and they go nuts. They sometimes become angry because they realize that they were misled. They’re too enthusiastic. They become zealots.

Too often they simply append the doctrine of predestination to their pre-existing fundamentalism.

We have a history of fundamentalism, in some respects, going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. I describe this pattern in the book. Several of our theologians were more resistant than they should have been to scientific change/development. The good news is that we overcame that problem in the 18th and 19th centuries but the reaction to liberalism in the 20th century has re-fueled some of the old fundamentalism. People are afraid and looking for certainty but they look in the wrong places. So they clamp down on exegetical issues like creation or women in society or they become soteriological moralists. I call it the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty (QIRC).

The book is about more than in-house definition, it’s also an invitation to others to look at or to examine what confessional Reformed theology, piety, and practice actually is.

Christopher,

Tell this fellow to look at the Three Points of Synod Kalamazoo (1924).

(1) On the basis of Scripture and Confession it is certain that there is, besides the saving grace of God shown only to the elect unto eternal life, also a kind of favor or grace of God which He manifests toward His creatures in general.

(2) According to Scripture and Confession there is a restraint of sin in the life of the individual human being and in society.

(3) According to Scripture and Confession unregenerate men, though incapable of any saving good, are capable of doing civil good. Acts 1924, Art. 132, pp. 145, 146; Acts 1926, Art. 89, pp. 114-131. (The context of these references gives the texts of Scripture and the passages in the Reformed Confessions on which these decisions rest.)

These points have been defended by Van Til and L. Berkhof among others. Anyone who says that they’re not Reformed needs to have his head examined.

Petrus van Mastricht (c. 1700), among others, taught a “non-salvific love” for the non-elect. This is not a terribly controversial idea among those who know their Reformed theology.

Sadly, too many Reformed folk live up the caricature of of the hard-headed predestinarian jerk who has deduced an entire theology from one doctrine.