what is Calvinism answer to how God works?

[Bob Crowley]

I have a personal concern due to something my father said the night he died and appeared in my room.

At one point he blurted out (with some alarm) "I always was doomed! I didn't really have any choice!"

I was an atheist at the time, but I argued back saying "That can't be right!"

He replied "Oh, it's right, all right. You can see that from here!"

But later in the same exchange he said "I was WILLING!" (to act as he did towards us and to consistently do so for over 20 years).

I still have trouble acceping his comment "... I didn't really have any choice!" I don't have any doubt he was condemned - his final terrifying scream just before he departed into eternity made that clear.

If we take Adolf Hitler as an extreme example, I don't think there's much doubt he "always was doomed" but I think we can also take it for granted that he was "VERY WILLING" to act as he did, with the mass murder of so many people.

In that regard, we might question God's goodness in that He was willing to sacrifice so many innocent people at the hands of one man and his cronies. I could make the same comment about Josef Stalin and the Gulags, Pol Pot and ground zero, Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, and even natural evil such as the Black Death.

Were they all part of God's "loving" plan? Even my old non-Calvinist pastor said to me once "I sometimes wonder if it's true!" (God's love) "He seems to write people off pretty easily".

And on another occasion he remarked "I sometimes wonder if He (God) wants to win. He doesn't seem to help his own people much."

We might need to find out just what God means by "Love"?

 

[Mark Quayle]

I have a personal concern due to something my father said the night he died and appeared in my room.

At one point he blurted out (with some alarm) "I always was doomed! I didn't really have any choice!"

I was an atheist at the time, but I argued back saying "That can't be right!"

He replied "Oh, it's right, all right. You can see that from here!"

But later in the same exchange he said "I was WILLING!" (to act as he did towards us and to consistently do so for over 20 years).

I still have trouble acceping his comment "... I didn't really have any choice!" I don't have any doubt he was condemned - his final terrifying scream just before he departed into eternity made that clear.

If we take Adolf Hitler as an extreme example, I don't think there's much doubt he "always was doomed" but I think we can also take it for granted that he was "VERY WILLING" to act as he did, with the mass murder of so many people.

In that regard, we might question God's goodness in that He was willing to sacrifice so many innocent people at the hands of one man and his cronies. I could make the same comment about Josef Stalin and the Gulags, Pol Pot and ground zero, Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, and even natural evil such as the Black Death.

Were they all part of God's "loving" plan? Even my old non-Calvinist pastor said to me once "I sometimes wonder if it's true!" (God's love) "He seems to write people off pretty easily".

And on another occasion he remarked "I sometimes wonder if He (God) wants to win. He doesn't seem to help his own people much."

We might need to find out just what God means by "Love"?

Remember that those remarks were typically said from the point of view of someone who doesn't know God. This life isn't for this life. I don't know whom your father intended by "[God's] own people", but 'helping them' is not God's primary purpose, but to turn his own each into those particular members of the Body of Christ, for which he created them.

One thing I might offer is to consider the difference between what "being" or "existence" is, as God, and what it is as mere humans. Can you compare our sentience to his? This is crass, but, do we consider the pain of worms worthy of foregoing a meal of fish?

Last, (and I can't prove this, but the math works): Everything good comes from God, even whatever good there is in a human. When God completely withdraws all that is good from them, there is nothing left but an empty husk at best, devoid of all that we thought human. A wraith, whose hatred for God is bubbling on the surface of their being, full of despair and loathing. There is no "made in the image of God" there.

The only good in any of us is God's doing.

The self-existent God did not need us. But he loved us. It is not up to chance, just whom he saves, but those whom he does not save have no excuse. Nor do we.