How Calvinism Relates to Evangelism and Apologetics
by Ed Enochs
The Evangelical Debate Society
"He who wins souls is wise."
~ Proverbs 11:30
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith." For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen" (Romans 1:16-25).
"The conversion of a sinner being not owing to a man's self determination, but to God's determination, and eternal election, which is absolute, and depending on the sovereign Will of God, and not on the free will of man; as is evident from what has been said : and it being very evident from the Scriptures, that the eternal election of saints to the faith and holiness, is also an election of them to eternal salvation; hence their appointment to salvation must also be absolute, and not depending on their contingent, self-determining will."
Jonathan Edwards
For the last 21 years I have been on an enthusiastic and insatiable quest, a rigorous quest for truth and the establishment of why Christianity is true and all other religious and ideological options are false in order to effectively and Biblical reach this lost and dying World with the Saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. Since repenting of my sins and receiving Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior on the University of Michigan Campus in Ann Arbor during the spring of 1986, I have had an all consuming desire to establish the best apologetical defense of Christianity to an unbelieving World.
For over two decades I have spent thousands of hours and a seemingly equal amount of dollars in taking classes in theology and apologetics at some of American Evangelicalism’s most prominent colleges and seminaries, with one goal in mind: Establishing why Christianity is true and other ideological and religious options are false.
As a teenager living in an East Coast college town, by God’s sovereign and unfathomable grace and gracious providential care, I had the unique privilege of being able to dialog with intellectual students from all over the world and having the million volume undergraduate library of the University of Michigan at my disposal to pour over innumerable books on philosophy, theology and history in an attempt to squelch my voracious appetite to know what is true and what is false.
Later, by God's mercy, as a student at the Moody Bible Institute, Biola University and the Master’s Seminary, I continued this pattern of rigorous study and have come to some conclusions about Apologetics that has taken two decades to develop and fine tune.
As many of you know, I am a committed Calvinist and have been for some time. Now, I am not a Calvinist for some parochial reason as though I want to be part of a fraternity of conservative Evangelicals who have decided that they alone are right and condescendingly look down their noses at anyone with less than a Calvinistic understanding of Christianity. I am a Calvinist simply because, after years of study, I believe the Calvinistic understanding of soteriology (doctrines of salvation) is consistent with the data we find in Holy Scripture.
In recent years, I have begun to see that there is a direct correlation between Soteriology and Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and apologetics. In other words, I believe one cannot detach his or her understanding of salvation with their understanding of why Christianity is true. That is, if they want to remain faithful to the inspired details of Holy Scripture.
When we look at the Bible, Almighty God’s, exclusively infallible, inerrant, inspired and uniquely authoritative Word, we find that the Holy Scriptures teach that men and women, due to Original Sin, via the Fall of Adam, are born dead in trespasses and sin, spiritually blinded, enslaved to sin, under the power and sway of Satan and in this totally depraved state, we humans, according to the Bible, are rendered absolutely incapable of saving ourselves or cooperating with God’s sovereign grace in the obtainment of salvation.
Romans 3:10-12 says," As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."
1 Cor 2:14 says, " The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
John 6:44, 64, 65, Jesus says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. Yet there are some of you who do not believe...." For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him."
Ephesians 2:1-5 says, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins...Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath....But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved.
The Bible teaches that Almighty God chooses an elect people unto Himself for the praise of His glory;
Thessalonians 1:4-5 says, " For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction.
1 Peter 1:1-2 Peter says, "An apostle of Jesus Christ, To God's elect (chosen ones), strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood:
1 Pet 2:9 says," But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
Ephesians 1:3-5 says, " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will."
The Bible teaches that it is Almighty God and God alone that opens a person's heart to believe the Gospel as the following verses richly illustrate:
The conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-20) is an illustration of God changing a man's free will. Saul had no choice in the matter of his salvation or his ministry. He was forcibly converted by God and made into God's apostle to the Gentiles.
Proverbs 21:1, The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.
Acts 13:48, When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.
Phil 2:12-13 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed--not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence--continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.
The Bible explicitly teaches that it is God who calls a person to salvation and it is God who preserves a person in his or her faith unto the end.
John 10:27-29, My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all ; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand.
John 6:37-39, All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.
Matthew 18:12-14 What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.
Phil 1:6 , "Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
The Bible clearly teaches that men and women are born totally spiritually blind, dead in trespasses and sin, depraved and without the capability to apprehend the truth of the Gospel and come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ on their own accord. According to the Bible, humanity needs the sovereign grace of God to open dead men's eyes and to be drawn to the redeeming cross of Jesus Christ. Any Evangelistic and Apologetics approach or methodology that does not take into account the Biblical record of humanities ruined and totally depraved sinful state before God is less than adequate and more than unbiblical.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of good news, how abjectly sinful men, women, boys and girls can be freed from the abhorrent state of wretched depravity they find themselves by turning from their sins and responding to the grace of God that the Almighty bestows upon those He elects and calls to salvation.
The sovereignty of God and Biblical Evangelism and Apologetics go hand in hand. In order to do evangelism and defend the historic Christian faith Biblically, we must witness for Christ and defend the faith God's way and on God's terms as found in the Bible.
The diligent and honest student of Scripture will soon see that the Bible places a tremendous emphasis on God's sovereignty and election, these "Doctrines of Grace" must be fully appropriated into ones evangelistic and apologetical outreach.
The Scriptures clearly teach that Almighty God is calling an elect people unto Himself, let us go out into the harvest Field of this lost and dying postmodern world, enslaved to self worship and depravity with the saving gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ which is the power of God unto salvation.
If it so happens that you are a non Christian who has read this theological treatise, I would like to invite you to repent of your sins and come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, God of very God, Light of very Light, whom God the Father sent to die upon the cross and rise again from the dead. Repent (turn from your sins) today and believe in Jesus Christ and then you will be saved and escape from the wrath of God which is coming nearer than you think.
"For whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."
Romans 10:13
by Ed Enochs
The Evangelical Debate Society
"He who wins souls is wise."
~ Proverbs 11:30
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith." For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen" (Romans 1:16-25).
"The conversion of a sinner being not owing to a man's self determination, but to God's determination, and eternal election, which is absolute, and depending on the sovereign Will of God, and not on the free will of man; as is evident from what has been said : and it being very evident from the Scriptures, that the eternal election of saints to the faith and holiness, is also an election of them to eternal salvation; hence their appointment to salvation must also be absolute, and not depending on their contingent, self-determining will."
Jonathan Edwards
For the last 21 years I have been on an enthusiastic and insatiable quest, a rigorous quest for truth and the establishment of why Christianity is true and all other religious and ideological options are false in order to effectively and Biblical reach this lost and dying World with the Saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. Since repenting of my sins and receiving Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior on the University of Michigan Campus in Ann Arbor during the spring of 1986, I have had an all consuming desire to establish the best apologetical defense of Christianity to an unbelieving World.
For over two decades I have spent thousands of hours and a seemingly equal amount of dollars in taking classes in theology and apologetics at some of American Evangelicalism’s most prominent colleges and seminaries, with one goal in mind: Establishing why Christianity is true and other ideological and religious options are false.
As a teenager living in an East Coast college town, by God’s sovereign and unfathomable grace and gracious providential care, I had the unique privilege of being able to dialog with intellectual students from all over the world and having the million volume undergraduate library of the University of Michigan at my disposal to pour over innumerable books on philosophy, theology and history in an attempt to squelch my voracious appetite to know what is true and what is false.
Later, by God's mercy, as a student at the Moody Bible Institute, Biola University and the Master’s Seminary, I continued this pattern of rigorous study and have come to some conclusions about Apologetics that has taken two decades to develop and fine tune.
As many of you know, I am a committed Calvinist and have been for some time. Now, I am not a Calvinist for some parochial reason as though I want to be part of a fraternity of conservative Evangelicals who have decided that they alone are right and condescendingly look down their noses at anyone with less than a Calvinistic understanding of Christianity. I am a Calvinist simply because, after years of study, I believe the Calvinistic understanding of soteriology (doctrines of salvation) is consistent with the data we find in Holy Scripture.
In recent years, I have begun to see that there is a direct correlation between Soteriology and Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and apologetics. In other words, I believe one cannot detach his or her understanding of salvation with their understanding of why Christianity is true. That is, if they want to remain faithful to the inspired details of Holy Scripture.
When we look at the Bible, Almighty God’s, exclusively infallible, inerrant, inspired and uniquely authoritative Word, we find that the Holy Scriptures teach that men and women, due to Original Sin, via the Fall of Adam, are born dead in trespasses and sin, spiritually blinded, enslaved to sin, under the power and sway of Satan and in this totally depraved state, we humans, according to the Bible, are rendered absolutely incapable of saving ourselves or cooperating with God’s sovereign grace in the obtainment of salvation.
Romans 3:10-12 says," As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."
1 Cor 2:14 says, " The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
John 6:44, 64, 65, Jesus says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. Yet there are some of you who do not believe...." For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him."
Ephesians 2:1-5 says, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins...Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath....But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved.
The Bible teaches that Almighty God chooses an elect people unto Himself for the praise of His glory;
Thessalonians 1:4-5 says, " For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction.
1 Peter 1:1-2 Peter says, "An apostle of Jesus Christ, To God's elect (chosen ones), strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood:
1 Pet 2:9 says," But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
Ephesians 1:3-5 says, " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will."
The Bible teaches that it is Almighty God and God alone that opens a person's heart to believe the Gospel as the following verses richly illustrate:
The conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-20) is an illustration of God changing a man's free will. Saul had no choice in the matter of his salvation or his ministry. He was forcibly converted by God and made into God's apostle to the Gentiles.
Proverbs 21:1, The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.
Acts 13:48, When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.
Phil 2:12-13 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed--not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence--continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.
The Bible explicitly teaches that it is God who calls a person to salvation and it is God who preserves a person in his or her faith unto the end.
John 10:27-29, My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all ; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand.
John 6:37-39, All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.
Matthew 18:12-14 What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.
Phil 1:6 , "Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
The Bible clearly teaches that men and women are born totally spiritually blind, dead in trespasses and sin, depraved and without the capability to apprehend the truth of the Gospel and come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ on their own accord. According to the Bible, humanity needs the sovereign grace of God to open dead men's eyes and to be drawn to the redeeming cross of Jesus Christ. Any Evangelistic and Apologetics approach or methodology that does not take into account the Biblical record of humanities ruined and totally depraved sinful state before God is less than adequate and more than unbiblical.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of good news, how abjectly sinful men, women, boys and girls can be freed from the abhorrent state of wretched depravity they find themselves by turning from their sins and responding to the grace of God that the Almighty bestows upon those He elects and calls to salvation.
The sovereignty of God and Biblical Evangelism and Apologetics go hand in hand. In order to do evangelism and defend the historic Christian faith Biblically, we must witness for Christ and defend the faith God's way and on God's terms as found in the Bible.
The diligent and honest student of Scripture will soon see that the Bible places a tremendous emphasis on God's sovereignty and election, these "Doctrines of Grace" must be fully appropriated into ones evangelistic and apologetical outreach.
The Scriptures clearly teach that Almighty God is calling an elect people unto Himself, let us go out into the harvest Field of this lost and dying postmodern world, enslaved to self worship and depravity with the saving gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ which is the power of God unto salvation.
If it so happens that you are a non Christian who has read this theological treatise, I would like to invite you to repent of your sins and come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, God of very God, Light of very Light, whom God the Father sent to die upon the cross and rise again from the dead. Repent (turn from your sins) today and believe in Jesus Christ and then you will be saved and escape from the wrath of God which is coming nearer than you think.
"For whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."
Romans 10:13
posted by Ed Enochs at 12:14 PM
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