Anthony Sacramone on Predestination

Anthony Sacramone of the Evangel blog at First Things has a great post that tears down the Calvinist doctrine of double-predestination (i.e. that God chose some people to be born for heaven and some for hell and there’s nothing anyone can do about – God grants faith to some people, and if you’re not one of the lucky few, you’re out of luck).  Here’s an excerpt that I particularly like:

If Calvinism, especially in its supralapsarian form—which argues that God foreordained the eternal fates of humans not yet created in a world not yet created, never mind fallen—is true, then most of us are lost, and not just because, in the words of Dirty Harry, we don’t feel particularly lucky, but because we are asked to love a monster. A deity who out Hitler’s Hitler in a blood-thirsty self-preening is too repellant to contemplate, never mind adore. Especially one whose obsession with his own glory reduces every person to nothing more than an adornment. If this is true, let’s please stop talking about the sanctity of human life. In this horrific scheme, there is nothing more expendable than a human being. “I need more glory—throw another baby on the barby!” (Whether non-elect infants go to hell has been a long-fought controversy within the Reformed world, admittedly, but there’s nothing it its confessions or theology that seriously argues against it.)

Pretty well sums up my thoughts on the idea of a God who would condemn most people to hell but save a few “for His own glory.”