Does God Love Everyone?

The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism

Walls

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498249348
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Does God truly love all persons? Most Christians think the obvious answer to this question is, "Yes, of course he does!" Indeed, many Christians would agree that the very heart of the gospel is that God so loved the whole world that he gave his Son to make salvation available for every single person. This book shows that one of the most popular and resurgent theological movements in the contemporary evangelical church--namely, Calvinism--cannot coherently and consistently affirm this vital claim about the love of God. While some Calvinists forthrightly deny that God loves everyone, more commonly Calvinists attempt to affirm the love of God for all persons in terms that are compatible with their doctrines that Christ died only for the elect--those persons God has unconditionally chosen to save. This book shows that the Calvinist attempts to affirm God's love for all persons are fraught with severe philosophical and theological difficulties. Calvinism, then, should be rejected in favor of a theology that can forthrightly and consistently affirm the love of God for all persons. Nothing less is at stake than the very heart of the gospel.

Part I

The Heart of What’s Wrong with Calvinism

chapter 1

The Love of God: The Blind Spot of Calvinism

One of the most extraordinary, yet revealing statements I have ever read from a Christian writer is the following by classic Calvinist theologian Arthur W. Pink: “When we say that God is sovereign in the exercise of His love, we mean that He loves whom he chooses. God does not love everybody . . . .”1

“When we say that God is sovereign in the exercise of His love, we mean that He loves whom he chooses. God does not love everybody.” A. W. Pink

If you heard a pastor preaching a sermon, and he forthrightly declared, “God does not love everybody” would you not be startled? Is not the very heart of the gospel that God loves everyone? Is that not the good news that we joyfully share with all persons? “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Unfortunately, Calvinists sometimes seem to have a blind spot for the love of God. Consider this question from The Shorter Catechism, which is an abbreviated version of The Westminster Confession of Faith, a classic Calvinist statement of faith. The Catechism asks this most fundamental theological question: “What is God?” Here is the answer that is given: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”2

Do you notice anything missing from this definition? Where is love? The definition mentions God’s power, his wisdom, and his justice, along with other attributes, but amazingly enough it leaves out perhaps the most beautiful definition of God in the entire Bible: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16).

Perhaps this should not surprise us if we consider another interesting fact that goes back to John Calvin himself, the famous theologian for whom Calvinism is named. Calvin’s most important and well-known work is his Institutes of the Christian Religion. This book is a landmark in the history of theology, and is rightly recognized as a great work in the history of Christian thought. My English translation of this book is 1,521 pages long (not counting bibliography and index)!

This book is Calvin’s systematic theology, and he quotes Scripture extensively throughout the book, as you would expect in a work of this sort. In fact, the Scripture index at the back of the book is forty pages long, listing the thousands of biblical texts discussed by Calvin in his monumental work.

Calvin

Not one time in The Institutes does Calvin ever quote “God is love.”

But here is what is truly remarkable: not one time in this book does Calvin ever quote “God is love.” In his massive book that is 1,521 pages long and that discusses thousands of biblical texts and discusses God’s nature extensively, Calvin never one time cited 1 John 4:8 or 1 John 4:16. Not even once! This is a stunning omission.

Why the love of God is so central

Now let us think about why the truth that “God is love” is so vital for the biblical revelation. The wonderful truth that God is love was only fully revealed through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Consider how the great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis explained the profound truth that lies at the heart of the claim that God is love.

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that “God is love.” But they seem not to notice that the words “God is love” have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.3

Notice that last line: “If God was a single person, then before the world was made, he was not love.” This has important implications for our understanding of the nature of God, as Old Testament scholar Dennis Kinlaw points out.

In the beginning when there was nothing but Yahweh alone, there was nothing for him to be sovereign over. So there must be something about Him that is greater than His sovereignty. His sovereignty is an expression of who he is in relation to everything that He created. But who was He and what was He like before there was anybody or anything else to whom He could relate?4

The ultimate answer to this question comes through Jesus. What we learn from the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus is that God has a Son, and that God is more than one Person. Indeed, after the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we see that the one God is three Persons.

This is how we understand that there is something about God greater and more essential to his Being than his sovereignty. Before there was a world over which God was exercising sovereignty, or reigning as King, God was love. Why? Because there was love between the three Persons of the Trinity from all eternity. If God had chosen never to create a universe, God would still be love.

We get a glimpse of this amazing and beautiful truth in Jesus’ prayer in John 17, the prayer he prays shortly before his death on the cross. This is often called Jesus’ high priestly prayer because Jesus prays for his disciples as well as all those who would come to believe in him later on.

My prayer is not for them [the disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. (John 17:20–21)

A few verses later, as his prayer continues, Jesus thinks back to his experience with his Father before the world was even created.

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. (John 17:24)

Again, notice that last line: there was love between the Father and the Son before the world ever existed, and that is the deepest explanation of the beautiful truth that God is love. The three Persons of the Holy Trinity have been expressing love for each other forever. God did not begin to love only after he created the world. Loving relationship is the deepest reality of all because the eternal God is a God of love! Jesus concludes his prayer as follows.

I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them. (John 17:26)

Jesus makes his Father known to us so that the love the Father has for his Son may also be in us! Jesus wants to make known to us the love of God so that the love of God can also fill us. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus put the point this way: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you” (John 15:9).

What an amazing thought! Jesus loves us with the same kind of love God expressed for him before the world was ever created. When we look at Jesus and observe the way he loved the world, we see a picture of the eternal love that existed between the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit from all eternity. Because God is love, nothing is stronger than love! Love is stronger than hate, stronger than evil, and even stronger than death.

So we see why the claim that God is love goes to the very heart of the Christian faith. We come to see this truth most clearly in light of God’s highest, final revelation, the revelation given through h...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: The Heart of What’s Wrong with Calvinism
• Part Two: God Is Love
• Further Reading
• Bibliography of Works Cited