Are Arminians Christians?

 

The above video is the fifth in the series of 16 short video clips from RC Sproul that I have been commenting on in my last series of posts. It tries to answer the question: “Are Arminians Christians?” It begins as follows:

“I often get the question from Reformed people, or also from Arminian people. They say, You know, this is a debate that we are carrying on here that is very serious; and they will say, RC, do you believe that Arminians are Christians? And that is a provocative question, when somebody asked me that; and I usually give a provocative answer! I will say, yes I do, barely! What I mean by that is that I believe, and I have always taught, that the difference between pure Pelagianism and Reformed theology, is the difference between belief and unbelief. The difference between liberalism and evangelicalism, is the difference between unbelief and belief. But the historic debate between Arminians and Calvinists, I have always said, was an intramural debate among Christians. And I differ and disagree with Arminians; but I believe that they are Christians—as long as they don’t take their theology to what I consider to be their logical conclusion. That is why we say they are Christians, but by a fortuitous, a felicitous inconsistency, a happy inconsistency. But if they ever came to the place where they actually were putting their trust in their own righteousness, as their theology I think would demand, then of course they wouldn’t be Christians.”

That requires some definitions, clarifications, and explanations. It is a deceptive argument. What he calls “trust in their own righteousness,” is what other people would call freewill, the freedom to choose—without our choices and decisions having been predestined and predetermined by God. That is his theological position: that all of man’s choices and decisions are predestined and predetermined by God; and man has no freewill, or freedom in the choices and decisions that he makes. He wouldn’t admit it of course. He would try to hide it by his so called “compatibilist” freewill, which is a false pretense and a fake freewill. The truth is that in his theology, man has no freewill; and therefore any attempt at attributing freedom of choice in the decisions that he makes, such as freely accepting or rejecting the gospel, to his way of thinking amounts to “trusting in your own righteousness”—which of course is heretical and false, and not biblical. That is the heresy of Calvinism. His theology reduces mankind to robots, which have no will of their own—although he would try to hide it, and not admit it. If you attribute freewill to the choices and decisions that man makes, such as freely accepting or rejecting the gospel, that amounts to “trusting in your own righteousness”. That is his theological thinking. Then he continues:

“But I don’t think they do that, I really don’t think they do that. And something I think is very important, whenever we have any discussion or debate about this question: I don’t think that anybody was ever saved by the doctrine of justification; and I don’t believe that anybody was ever saved by the doctrine of election. Now people breathe a sigh of relief; they say, well, I guess that means that it doesn’t matter. Oh no, no, no, no.”

The “doctrine of justification” and “doctrine of election” that he is talking about are of course none other than the doctrine of predestination and predetermination. They are a cover for that. In other words in his theology, that is a red line that cannot be crossed. Any attempt at attributing freewill to man in the acceptance or rejection of the gospel, amounts to “trusting in your own righteousness”. But he is not honest about it; he tries to hide it; because he knows the criticisms that his theology would be exposed to if he openly admitted it. He continues:  

“You know, when I became a Christian, I was overwhelmed by a sense of my guilt. I fell down on my knees, I begged God for mercy, God forgave me, I met Christ, and so on, and I was a new creation. I didn’t have a clue how it happened, what God had done to bring me to faith. I assumed that I heard the gospel, I made a choice, I met Christ, and I was saved. I had no understanding of the work of the Holy Ghost in that whole process by which I was brought to the faith; and I think that that is true for most people; when they come to faith, they don’t have an analytical grasp of all of the interior things that are going on, and how God is operating in their heart and in their soul.”

In other words, what he is saying is that when people are first converted, they are not aware of the predestination and predetermination aspect of how it happens. They think that they freely made a choice, a decision, and it all happened. They need to be educated in his Calvinistic and Reformed theology to figure that out. He continues:

“It was only through a reading of the New Testament, and through a study of the scriptures, that I came to understand that at the moment that I came to faith, it was God who rescued me from my bondage, and that God had done something in me, before I ever embraced Christ in faith.”

The truth is that it was not the New Testament or scripture that led him to his belief in predestination and predetermination; it was his Calvinistic theology that did. The Bible teaches no such thing. Nobody denies the role of the Holy Ghost in the conversion process. Nobody denies the sovereignty of God. But none of that is a synonym for predestination and predetermination. He throws those nice words around as a means of covering up, sugarcoating, and masquerading his false theology of predestination and predetermination. And finally he concludes:

“And so now, when we step back, and we reflect on how salvation occurred, that is where Calvinists and Arminians get into the argument, you know, they don’t agree on understanding what the Bible teaches is the way in which a person is brought to faith.”

Except that that is not what the Bible teaches; it is what Calvinism teaches; which is unbiblical, and the most serious heresy that has arisen in Christendom since Christianity came into existence.