By selective use of Reformed Confessions it is possible to claim to be reformed but at the same time hide the fact that you are a hyper-Calvinist. The hyper-Calvinist denies that God loves all mankind and that the gospel is good news to be declared to all without exception. That is the very essence of hyper-Calvinism. Calvin, the great organiser of the evangelisation of France, writes on John 3:16: 'For although there is nothing in the world deserving God's favour, he nevertheless shows he is favourable to the whole world when he calls all without exception to the faith of Christ.'Erroll Hulse, “John 3:16 and Hyper-Calvinism,” in Reformation Today 135 (September–October, 1993): 27–30.
Rev. H Hoeksema, in a booklet entitled The Gospel, denies that the gospel can be offered since fallen man is unable to repent. Hoeksema says that the promise of the gospel is not iven to all but only to the seed of Abraham (that is, to the elect).
It is typical of hyper-Calvinism to rationalise. By rationalising I mean that the hyper takes the doctrine of total depravity and reasons that because man's will is crippled by the fall it is futile to offer the gospel. Moreover it cannot be sincere of God to offer the gospel to all if he does not intend to save all. In other words this rationalisation effectively emasculates the gospel so that it is not good news for the sinner at all.
It is impossible for the hyper to proclaim the love of God for sinners. What he can proclaim is that out there in the world are God's elect and God loves them but he hates the rest! That is hardly good news!
The good news is that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that all who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life. Rightly did Calvin understand that it is this fallen, perishing world that God loved.
The gospel that came to me as a sinner was the gospel of God's love, that he loved me and found no pleasure that I should perish in hell. The good news was conditional. To be saved I had to repent and believe on Christ. That I had to do my very self. But in the event I could not because of my slavery to sin, yet I knew that to be saved I would have to repent and believe. There was only one thing to do and that was to look to Christ to do for me, and in me, what I could not do myself. When I looked to him in my hopeless state he saved me. Hallelujah! It was the love of God for lost sinners that drew me. It was the love of God that held before me Christ, crucified on the cross for me. The exact order of John chapter three applied: God's love for sinners and God's love expressed in the cross for sinners.
This is the love of God that we must take to all without exception. The conditions must be set before all sinners that to be saved they must repent and believe. If they discover the enormity of their sinful depravity then let them not despair. Point them to Christ. Do what the Methodist preacher did to the young Spurgeon when he exhorted him personally from the text from Isaiah" 'Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God and there is no other' (Is 45:22).
We accept truth by faith not human reason
The problem both with the Arminian and the hyper-Calvinist is that they rationalise according to human reason. The Arminian reasons that the sinner can of himself do whatever God commands. Therefore he believes that man has free will. The hyper does the same but rationalises in a different way. He reasons that because man is enslaved in his will, it is inconsistent for the Lord to offer him something that he has not the power to respond to. Can we who follow Calvin and the Puritans help Arminians and hypers?
It is much easier to help Arminians because most of them have not been faced with the doctrine of the fall and of election. I used to be a rapid Arminian. Hypers are more difficult to help because they tend to entrench themselves in their human rationalisation. But some have been delivered from that. The hyper-Calvinist (Standard Bearer group) in Northern Ireland referred to in RT 132 cannot endure the word antinomy used by Jim Packer in his book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. They cannot abide it and call it poison! This is not surprising because it challenges them to renounce their rationalisation. Since I believe in common grace and the love of God for all mankind I am called an Arminian by them. I am honoured to be placed in the company of John Calvin, Jim Packer, Prof John Murray, Dr Lloyd-Jones and the Puritans all of whom decline the rationalistic constrictions of hyperism. It might help to point to the fact that there are a number of subjects concerning God that are above human rationalisation as we read in Isaiah:
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways above your ways
and my thoughts above your thoughts,
declares the LORD
Herman Bavinck in his book The Doctrine of God[1] begins his monumental study of the names and attributes of God by considering the fact that God is both knowable and unknowable. We can applaud him for his discernment. That certainly is the correct place to begin.
We must stress the knowability of God because to know him in the personal way of being reconciled to him and loving him is to enjoy eternal life, as Jesus said: 'Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent' (Jn 17:3). We may know God extensively and comprehensively according to all that he has revealed of himself in Holy Scripture.
Does God have Feelings?
Yet there are ways in which we cannot know God. We are finite and he is infinite. He is eternal and we are created. He is immutable and we are subject to change. There are some issues we can never fully grasp. We simply accept them. One such subject is the Trinity.[2] Another difficult issue which soars above us is what theologians call the impassibility of God. God in his divine being cannot suffer in the way that we do. He is not physical. He cannot be overcome with surprise. He is not subject to moods and passions. Are we to conclude that God is devoid of emotion or feeling? What are we to make of the statement, 'God is love'?
Surely we are to understand by God's love everything that constitutes true love, including emotion and feeling. There is no such thing as love which does not feel. Love as expressed in the Scripture is a love which comes from all the heart, that is all the affections. Yet how can an impassible God have feeling? This feeling is not confined to love. We read in Scripture that wrath is being treasured up against the day of wrath (Rom 2:5). This wrath must be conceived of in terms of controlled feeling. We know that God loves and hates, and loves and hates in a way we can understand. Yet at the same time he loves and hates in a way which is peculiar to himself, that is in a way which does not deny his immutability as God. Details of this subject transcend our ability to grasp. God is at one and the same time both knowable and unknowable.
A similar problem confronts us with God's love for sinners. How can he love and hate sinners at the same time? 'You hate all who do wrong' (Ps 5:5). At the same time we read, 'But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners Christ died for us.' The stress is on the fact that while we were sinners we were loved. This is not because we were better sinners or meritorious sinners. The text does not say that God loved us because he saw he could do something with us to make us attractive. We were children of wrath but at the same time we were loved. And God so loved us that he gave his one and only Son for us.
Righteous hatred and love mingle in our hearts at the same time. We are not permitted to hate with the hatred of vengeance. Vengeance belongs to God (Rom 12:19). It is not too much for us to believe that God contains within himself all that goes to make up perfect love and perfect hatred. We know that is so, but how it is so is unknowable. And it does not matter because we are required to believe, not to rationalise.
God loathes the wicked in their detestable, sinful practices (Ez 18:10-13). At the same time he says: 'Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?' declares the sovereign LORD. 'Rather am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?' Moab deserved severe judgment. Her destruction as a nation was decreed yet at the same time the LORD declared, 'Therefore I wail over Moab, for all Moab I cry out... So my heart laments for Moab like a flute; it laments like a fulte for the men of Kir Hareseth' (Jer 48:31,36).[3] Jesus wept bitterly over lost sinners of Jerusalem (Lk 19:41). Being filled with his love we weep over lost sinners.
How then does God both hate and at the same time sorrow like a heartbreaking, mournful melody played on a flute? According to the hyper God only loves the elect and hates the non-elect. Hypers cannot take John 3:16 and say that God loves the fallen sinful world, that is, loves sinners as sinners. A hyper cannot say to a sinner, 'God loves you and wishes you to be saved and he has so loved you that he has given his only begotten Son that you might not perish but have eternal life.' We note well that John 3:16 does not say, for God so loved the elect. The Holy Spirit did not write the text that way. Are we to understand that 'the world' here means both Jews and Gentiles? The word 'world' must be interpreted in the way it is used throughout the Gospel, namely, all people without exception not all people without distinction. In John's Gospel the Jews do not stand in contrast to the world. The world is that whole world into which Jesus came, that world which did not recognise him (Jn 1:10).
I conclude by drawing attention to that little word so. 'God so (Greek houtōs) loved the world.' What a glory there is in that word so. We find the same word in 1 John 4:11, 'Beloved, if God so loved us.' How we could be so loved is as mysterious as it is wonderful. The word so fills the text with the sunshine of heaven and fills our hearts with wonder, love and praise. It fills our souls with a desire to tell the whole world of that great and marvellous love of God for lost sinners. 'Love so amazing, so divine demands my life, my soul, my all!'
_______________
1. Bavinck, The Doctrine of God, translated by William Hendriksen, 403 pages, Eerdmans, 1951, Banner of Truth, 1977).
2. Andrew King told us at the Carey Family Conference of a conversation he had with a Muslim. The Muslim said that part of his religion was belief in the transcendence of God. Andrew responded by asking his Muslim friend if he was prepared to accept the Christian doctrine of the Trinity since that truth also belongs to the transcendent. We can understand it yet we cannot. We know yet we do not know. God is transcendent.
3. Further proof that God loves sinners can be found by engaging in a word study of the Hebrew word hesed (loving-kindness) which occurs almost 250 times in the Old Testament.
Update on 9-1-2014:
Hyper-Calvinism—The essence of Hyper-Calvinism is to deny the common grace of the love of God to all men. In other words, it teaches that God only loves the elect and has only hatred for the non-elect. Further, Hyper-Calvinism denies the sincere free offers of the gospel to all men.Erroll Hulse, Who Are The Puritans? And What Do They Teach? (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000), 24.
The very essence of hyper-calvinism is the denial of common grace and the free offer of the gospel.Erroll Hulse, “News: Hyper-Calvinism in Northern Ireland,” Reformation Today 132 (March–April 1993): 22.
As we see from the Westminster Confession and the 1689 Baptist Confession the Puritans believed in the doctrines of grace such as election and particular redemption (Rom 8:28-30). They followed Calvin in resisting false human rationalisations. For instance they resisted the idea that God only loves the elect and hates the non-elect. This error is called hyper-Calvinism. It is a very serious error which is recurring today. The Puritans were experts in their understanding of the concept of common grace although they did not use that term. Their teaching accords fully with the way in which the doctrine of Common Grace is expounded by Prof John Murray (cf Works). They believed that the Holy Spirit is constantly active in restraining evil and promoting good throughout society. The Puritans believed in the universal love of God for all mankind (1 Tim 2:1-6; 2 Peter 3:9). They believed in the universal provision of God for all mankind according to the covenant made with Noah as representative of the whole world (Gen 8:20-22 and Ps 145).Erroll Hulse, “The Example of the English Puritans,” Reformation Today 153 (September–October 1996): 27.
Two heresies in particular destroy the Gospel as far as its evangelistic thrust is concerned. One is hyper-Calvinism in which the free offers of the Gospel are denied and in which an excuse is made of the fact that men are dead in sin and therefore there is no point in evangelizing. Total human responsibility (men know that they ought to repent and believe the Gospel) must be maintained together with faith in the sovereignty of God. These matters cannot be reconciled to human logic. The hyper-Calvinist in his desire to be logical comes to the wrong conclusion that it is inconsistent to command sinners to repent and believe when they are unable to do so, which is entirely an unbiblical and false conclusion!Excerpted from an address by Erroll Hulse to The Carey Conference in 1975
Now it is true that the doctrines of grace misconstrued can lead to what we call hyper-alvinism—that is the denial of the free offers of the Gospel. Departing from the position held by John Calvin, the hyper-Calvinist thinks it inconsistent, indeed dishonouring to God, to offer the Gospel to all men. The main misunderstanding has centred around the issue of man's ability. Free offers seem in the eyes of the hyper-Calvinists to imply free will and this to them contradicts the sovereignty of God in His irresistible grace to call whom He wills to Himself.
To outline the history of hyper-Calvinism in all its branches, and in particular its fettering and shackling influence in the realm of persuading souls would take a College term to accomplish. A brief outline, however, is necessary.
Joseph Hussey (1660-1694) was one of the architects of hyper-Calvinism who applied strict logic to Christian doctrine and wrote a book the title of which testifies truly to its contents, God's Operations of Grace but no Offers of His Grace. Others associated with this position were Skepp, Wayman, Brine and the famous John Gill.From Adding to the Church: A Puritan Approach to Persuading Souls by Erroll Hulse. This article appeared in Adding to the Church: and other papers given at the Westminster Conference, (Westminster Conference, 1974) being papers read at the 1973 Conference." excerpts from Adding to the Church—The Puritan Approach to Persuading Souls by Erroll Hulse
In the Dutch speaking world the question of the free offer has been debated down the years and there has been an overflow of the controversy into the American Dutch churches which in turn has affected the English world. The Dutch have given much more attention to the subject of common grace. Common grace is implicit in Puritan theology. John Owen gives it some of its best statements (See Owen's commentary on Hebrews 6:4-6. Also Works Vol. 3, p. 236, and Vol. 11, p. 640ff.). The question is of crucial importance because common grace teaches that, although man has fallen, God always addresses him as man, that is, according to His revealed will that He, God, desires the salvation of all men, and never addresses them in terms of His secret will. 'The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever.' Hence the Puritans used such texts as 2 Peter 3:9 and 2 Tim. 2:4, 'who will have all men to be saved', at their face value and without any equivocation; that is that God declares His will for the salvation of all sinners to whom the Gospel is addressed upon the terms proposed, namely, the obedience of faith.
A denial of common grace, which is the position of Herman Hoeksema of our century, turns the Gospel into a principle of divine power and causation. As James Daane, a contemporary American theologian points out, 'Such a Gospel can be announced—cooly, objectively, without pathos or human concern or tears—but it cannot be preached with persuasion' (The Freedom of God. A study of election and the pulpit. James Daane, Eerdman, 1973.).
Update on 9-15-14:
[Herman] Hanko speaks for a minority, Dutch, hyper-Calvinistic school, a group hostile to the doctrine of common grace that God loves all men and desires that all be saved.Erroll Hulse, "Global Revival: Should We Be Involved in Concerts of Prayer?" Reformation and Revival 2.4 (Fall 1993): 29.
Update on 2-17-16:
Hyper-Calvinism denies both the free offer of the gospel and common grace. In essence, Hyper-Calvinists would emphasize divine responsibility to the exclusion of human responsibility. Since Calvinists believe that the work of salvation is entirely God’s work, Hyper-Calvinists would take that a step further and say that since men and women can do nothing to save themselves, it is wrong to call people to do what they cannot do — it is just for God to work in the heart, not for others to call them to repentance.Erroll Hulse, Who Saves, God or Me? Calvinism for the Twenty-First Century (Darlington, UK: EP Books, 2008), 91–92.
Update on 6-20-17:
Thirdly there is the question of God’s love. If God only loves the elect and only hates the non-elect, what constraint is there for the sinner to turn and believe? Richard Baxter in his Call to the Unconverted drives home the strong language and reasoning used by the sovereign Lord, as expressed in Ezekiel 18. He has no pleasure in the wicked that he should die, but rather that the wicked person should turn from his wicked way and live. Our Lord made it clear that we are to love our enemies because God looks upon them with kindness (Luke 6:35). The love of God for all mankind, even the most terrible sinners, is well expressed by the Puritan John Howe in his sermon, ‘The Redeemer’s tears shed over lost souls’.Erroll Hulse, “Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility,” Evangelical Times 33.9 (September 1999): ?.
Clearly, God’s redeeming love for the elect goes beyond the ‘loving-kindness’ he displays to all men. But the Bible teaches clearly that God regards all his creatures with compassion and concern.
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