ALL MEANS ALL?

If you will indulge me, I want to share a follow up to yesterday's snippet of my exchange online with a Calvinist named "Dulls". 

(No comment. 😏)

I ranted for several paragraphs about how the Calvinist presuppositions about God determining all things makes their God a sadist, creating billions of sentient beings who are born predestined to die and face God's wrath. There is no definition of "love" which could be stretched to encompass God's apparent feelings towards those destined for hell. He hates them. And Dulls is OK with that. 

(A bone-chilling admission for a Christian.)

How did Dulls respond to my criticism of the Calvinist God's sadism? He gave me this sentence:  "It comes down to the fact that I dont hold as lofty a view of human nature as you do."

And because I had further questioned how Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son could possibly fit within Calvinist ideology, Dulls gave me a second sentence: "The prodigal son was always his son."

In other words, Jesus' parable is the story of a person who is already elect. Already guaranteed a happy ending.

That's convenient. But there's nothing in the story that would justify that reading.

So I ranted again, as follows:

Me: It's not just me who has a "lofty" view of humans. Apparently King David did too: Psalm 8:4 "What is man that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You care for him? 5You made him a little lower than the angels; You crowned him with glory and honor. 6You made him ruler of the works of Your hands; You have placed everything under his feet: 7all sheep and oxen, and even the beasts of the field, 8the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas." You want to blow your mind? Take a close look at Romans 3:9-18, a foundational text for total depravity ("no one is righteous, not even one", etc) and then look up the CONTEXT of the OT passages being quoted by Paul. Psalm 14:1-3, is a great place to start: 1 The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. 2 The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. 3 All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one. The "ALL" of verse 3 (which makes its way eventually to Romans 3) is clearly referring here to FOOLS who deny God's existence, a stance which causes their corruption. To further prove that he is not speaking of ALL HUMANITY, David goes on (important context) to speak of those same people as "evildoers" who devour GOD'S PEOPLE (v.4). And in verse 5 David speaks of God being "present in the company of the RIGHTEOUS" (v.5). How does total depravity account for "no one does good" and righteous people in the same short psalm? This understanding that some humans spiral into greater levels of depravity BECAUSE of their denial of God fits with Romans 1 and makes better sense of what Paul is really addressing in Romans 3 and in the book as a whole. So ... ironically, Romans 3 is the one place where Calvinists really should question whether "all means all". But they don't.