Audio only:
Joe’s response to Redeemed Zoomer (and the other Calvinists) who said he was strawmanning Calvinism in my last video.
Transcript:
Joe:
If you can watch ’em in the video, skip my entire third part where I lay out how this is a logical contradiction and he just says, well, let me know if I missed anything important. You did. You missed the crux of the argument. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I’d originally planned to do an episode unpacking the biblical usage of terms like love and hate. Particularly when you hear God saying things like, Jacob, have I loved Esau? Have I hated? But in the last episode, which came out Tuesday, I argued that the Calvinism preached by folks like RC Sproul and John MacArthur is not only theologically false, but actually logically incoherent and its vision of the love of God. I invited pushback from those who disagreed with my argument, and thankfully I got a lot of it. The Calvinist YouTuber redeemed Zoomer quickly made a reply video without actually watching the episode first. Now in his reply, he accuses me of straw manning Calvinism. Now, this is pretty unsurprising. I think anyone who’s ever critiqued Calvinism before his experienced this knee-jerk reaction that some Calvinists have of insisting that your critiques must be straw men. Now, that can be true. Some criticisms of Calvinism are straw men, but overwhelmingly the people saying, straw man, straw man, straw man, don’t seem to realize that you have to actually show how an argument is a straw man and that it’s not something you just declare to escape any critique of your theology.
I
CLIP:
Declare bankruptcy. Hey, I just wanted you to know that you can’t just say the word bankruptcy and expect anything to happen. I didn’t say it, I declared it. Still, that’s not
Joe:
Anything. So I want to make a relatively brief video both explaining my own argument, which redeem Zimmer largely doesn’t really engage with, but also explaining why you can’t defend your theology, but just waving all criticisms away as strawman. Now, if you want the full version of my original argument, go back and watch the last episode all the way to the end. But if you want the short version, it goes something like this. Number one, as Christians, we are called to love our neighbors and even our enemies and with a love that desires their salvation. Number two, this kind of love of neighbor is a gift from God. This is very clear from scripture, but number three, and this is where it gets controversial according to Calvinists like RC Sproul and John MacArthur, God himself doesn’t even have this kind of love for most of my neighbor.
He might love them in some generic sense, but in the specific sense that we’re talking about, he doesn’t love them. Now you’ll notice the first two of those three points are uncontroversial. The third one is a huge problem because logically those three things can’t all be true. If God doesn’t have this kind of love from my neighbor, then I can’t receive it from him, and if I don’t receive it from him that I don’t have it to give. I clearly cannot love my neighbor then in the way the Bible tells me to. So it’s absurd to demand of creatures that they have more divine love for Mr. Smith down the street than God has for Mr. Smith. Now, there might be some great arguments against this, but if there are, I have not heard them yet. Now, a good rebuttal would either say maybe one of those three points isn’t true or it’s possible to hold all three at the same time without contradiction somehow.
But unless I’ve missed it, not one of the many Calvinists who rushed to the comments to express their opinions or rush to make reply videos ever actually engages with my actual argument in any clear and substantive way. Instead, most of what I’ve heard are either people claiming that various Catholic saints believe the same three things or something like this. Now, that may or may not be true or false in at least many of the claim cases. It’s false, but more importantly, it’s irrelevant. If somebody points out an error in your reasoning, it is not a rebuttal to say, well, a great saint made that same mistake once too. At worst, it’s just you committing another logical fallacy. At best, it’s an argument from authority though Saint X thought this, so therefore it must be right. But as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out in the Summa, the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest form of argumentation.
And since St. Thomas Aquinas said it, you know it’s true. So even the people making these claims, even if they were right about everything, the most they would show is that maybe some Catholic theologians or even great saints had misunderstood God’s love for sinners and understood it in a way that doesn’t withstand logical scrutiny. Now, in my view, the most interesting reply was actually from Matt Perman who offered a lengthy two-part defense of the doctrines of limited atonement and penal substitution in the comments, but even Peron’s input. While much appreciated, thoughtful, well received, it’s not an argument against what I’m laying out here as best as I can tell. It’s more arguing things adjacent to points that I made, which still I’m happy to receive it head and shoulders above all the other criticisms because the vast majority of comments were just, Calvin is simply declaring strawman like it was the game of Uno, and that was their last card. And it’s painfully clear that most of the people using the term strawman have no idea what a straw man is.
CLIP:
So a straw man fallacy occurs when someone takes your argument, claim or opinion and distorts it into some kind of extreme version, and then after that, they attack that extremist version as if that was really the argument you were making.
Joe:
And look, Catholics are not immune from attacking straw and forms of Protestant arguments in redeem zoomer response video. If you look in the bottom right corner, you’ll see another video that I made warning Catholics about certain arguments that we shouldn’t use, and one of the arguments I warned about is don’t act like every Protestant is a Baptist, assuming that a Lutheran and a Methodist are basically just Baptist and responding accordingly would be arguing against a strawman version of the Lutheran and the Methodist theology. So in the video that redeem zoomer is critiquing, there’s room that it could be making straw mans, for instance, I argue that Spro and MacArthur’s view of the love of God is not just unbiblical but logically incoherent. Now, if I’m exaggerating what Spro and MacArthur really believe, that would be a strong man. So I took care to try to quote them directly and hopefully in context, redeem zoomer for what it’s worth, actually appears to agree with these criticisms. He goes beyond me in his critiques of them and of their theology.
CLIP:
So here I’m more criticizing RC Sproul than Joe Hess, but I am criticizing Joe. Hes Meyer for appealing more to RC Sproul than any of the official reform documents on this question. Okay? When people ask me like, oh, redeemed zoomer, why are you slandering faithful men like RC Sproul? This is why. If this was what Calvinism teaches, then I would’ve left Calvinism long ago,
Joe:
A second possible straw man. It would be a straw man if I said all Calvinists agree with spro and MacArthur. But as you’re going to see, I say literally the opposite. I take pains to point out that there are a bunch of different types of Calvinism, and whether my critique of them applies to your own form of Calvinism is really something for you to figure out. Now, related to all this is a principle of intellectual charity. You should try to give the strongest version of your opponent’s argument what sometimes called the steelman version. So for instance, when St. Thomas Aquinas answers atheism, he offers the strongest atheist objections that he can find first, but he doesn’t just replace those atheist objections with a stronger argument like God exists because now you’re not giving a strong version of their argument, you’re scrapping their argument. So it’s important that we actually represent the theology being presented by people like John MacArthur and RC Sproul.
Whether we like it or not, the best version of their argument might still be a bad argument, but you know what isn’t a straw man? The mere fact that you might not happen to agree with a person or denomination being criticized, if I say Pastor X is wrong and you reply, that’s a straw man, I don’t happen to share Pastor X’s theology, then you clearly don’t know what a straw man is. So with that, let’s take a look at what redeem zoomer has to say about my argument and his idiosyncratic use of the term straw man. Now, I should point out at the outset that he’s intentionally ignorant. For whatever reason, he purposely decides not to watch the video before making a reply, and in fact, he never gets through the whole thing and instead he decides to just guess what it’s going to be about. Let’s see, for yourself,
CLIP:
Catholics often criticize Calvinists for teaching things that many Catholic saints actually believed, but modern Catholics don’t know that. What’s up guys? I’m redeem zoomer. I’m a Presbyterian, I’m a Calvinist, and I’m going to be responding to this video from the famous Catholic apologist, Joe Hess Meyer. I haven’t watched it yet, but you guys told me that he mentions me in the video, and this is a communist understanding, so I don’t know exactly what he’s going to say, but I can probably predict it. He’s probably going to go after Calvinists for our teaching of predestination. It’s
Joe:
A made up tale,
CLIP:
Which is something that many Catholic saints like Thomas Aquinas and Augustine have
Joe:
Also taught. So again, in summaries, redeem zoomer just assumes that this is going to be a video about predestination and assumes further that I’m unaware of the theologies of people like St. Augustine in St. Thomas Aquinas on predestination. Now, both of those assumptions are wildly wrong and completely baseless. There was no reason for him to assume either that the topic was going to be predestination nothing, and the title says it’s going to be, and nothing in anything said it was going to be or that I was going to just be ignorant. He could have literally watched the video before trying to craft a response and spared himself this embarrassment. Fine. We’ll see where he goes from here.
CLIP:
So I’m wondering if he’s going to actually acknowledge that in this video, but because he seems like one of those pop apologists, he probably won’t.
Joe:
So adding to the baseless assumptions, I’m going to be arguing about predestination and I’m going to be ignorant. He’s now also claiming that I’m probably just a pop apologist. Now rhetorically, this is obviously a case of poisoning the well, a pretty classic case. He’s got no idea what the topic is. He has no idea apparently who I am, and he prematurely signals that I’m wrong and ignorant and not trustworthy, having literally no idea if those things are true. Now, look, as for the charge of being a pop apologist who doesn’t know anything about Calvinism or the theology of St. Thomas a whiteness, I don’t want to stand on academic credentials. I rarely bring them up, but if they’re going to be challenged, I’ve got degrees in history, law, philosophy, and theology. My history degree was under the tutelage of Dr. Allen Berryman, one of the biographers of the Puritan John Owen.
I was actually Berman’s very first advisee way back in the day. Further than I would like to admit, both my philosophy and theology degrees are from Mistic institutions. In the latter case at the Angelica, the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, where St. Thomas Aquinas not only is taught but literally did teach in the sense that he was one of the early professors there. So I’m not sure exactly why he assumes I don’t have a familiarity with Calvinist theology or Thomistic theology. Neither of those things are true for his own part. Redeem Zoomer plays Minecraft. Well idly talking about theology, and he’s preparing to go to seminary at some point in the future, and that’s fine. I’m glad that he’s grappling with big and important topics. I’m glad he’s going to get more of an education on theology, but it’s bizarre to receive the charge of pop apologist from him in particular. So in any case, given that he’s already prejudged that I’m a pop apologist doing a video on predestination, he’s already accusing me of making a straw man argument literally before he ever hears me make one argument.
CLIP:
Most Pop Catholicism really straw man’s Calvinism and forgets that many of their saints teach something very similar, if not identical to the Calvinist view of predestination. But let’s get into it.
Joe:
I think it is. So tell him that he makes the allegation of straw man before he’s even heard a single argument before he even knows what the topic of the video is going to be about. It’s that much of a knee jerk response that any critique of Calvinism and bam, oh straw man, straw man is like the wolf that a lot of Calvinists cry. Whether it makes any sense in context or not, you keep using the word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Now, eventually redeemed Zoomers sort of figures out at least kind of that he was wrong, that this was not about predestination, that it was actually about the doctrines associated with the love of God, particularly as held by RC Sproul and John MacArthur. Now he pivots. Now he invents a new strawman. Now, the straw man isn’t that some Catholics agree with the Calvinist view, which by the way would not have been a straw man.
That was the first critique that he made and has no relevance to the actual argument I’m making. Now, the argument is that I focus on people like Spro and MacArthur, so I’m going to play you my words and then I want you to listen to his reaction. And just to make sure that I’m not unwittingly mischaracterizing Calvinist theology, I’m going to be focusing here on the form of Calvinism taught by some of the most popular Calvinist preachers like John MacArthur or the late Archie Sproul. Now, there may be other Protestants who call themselves reformed or Calvinist who disagree with that form of Calvinism. Maybe this doesn’t all apply to you, but this is the form that I see in here most often under the banner of Calvinism, and I think it’s worth replying to. Now, you’ll notice I was completely prepared for people jumping in the comments to claim strawman no matter what I said, I know how badly some Calvinists want to dismiss all criticism of their system just as strawman.
And so in literally the first minute of the episode, I clarified, look, there are different types of Calvinism. This may or may not apply to your flavor of Calvinism. There are four point Calvinists, there are five point Calvinists, there are seven point Calvinists. There are hyper Calvinists, there are infra lap Syrias. There’re super lap Syrias, there are Baptist Calvinists and on and on and on. And guess what? There’s no Calvinist pope out there deciding who does and doesn’t get to call themselves Calvinist or who does or doesn’t get to belong in the church of Calvin. So amongst these competing forms of Calvinism, you’ve got a bunch of American Christians particularly who call themselves Calvinist and who follow pastors like John MacArthur and RC Sproul, and it’s their theology that I’m critiquing. Now, if it happens that my critique of MacArthur and Sproul also applies to your own flavor of Calvinism, that’s good to know.
You should change your view, but if it doesn’t, then guess what? The video is not about you. And again and again, I literally say in the very first minute why I focus on Spro and MacArthur because their theology is popular. This is what real life Calvinists in the US often believe, whether you think that they should or not, whether you think this is faithful to what John Calvin believed or not, these are the real life views of a lot of self-proclaimed Calvinist, evangelical American Protestants and these views are worth responding to. But that’s pretty clear, right? There’s no possible way you could get from I’m focusing on Spro and MacArthur. This may or may not reflect your own personal view of Calvinism to somehow get to Joe claims that Spro and MacArthur represent historic Calvinism, right? That’d be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?
CLIP:
He just said, I’m not going to straw man, Calvinism. And then the two people he lists are John MacArthur is a historian Baptist and RC Sproul, who is also basically a historian Baptist. Neither of these guys are in tune with historic Calvinism.
Joe:
Look, if somebody says, father James Martin teaches dangerous ideas, that is not a straw man. You might agree or disagree, but it does not mean therefore all Catholics agree with Father James Martin that does not remotely follow, and yet this obviously wrong use of the term strawman is actually most of redeemed zoomer critique. He just thinks it’s a straw man to make a video about Spro and MacArthur rather than the video that he, for whatever reason, assumed I was going to make.
CLIP:
Okay, so we’re like a third of the way into video. He has not quoted a single authority on Calvinism. He has not quoted a single reformer, a single Calvinist confession. He’s just quoted John MacArthur, RC Sproul and the Gospel Coalition.
Joe:
So he’s upset that my video responding to the theology of Calvinist like RC Spro and John MacArthur quotes RC Sproul and John MacArthur, and that I didn’t instead make a video unpacking the historic reformed confessions. Now, he complains about this over and over again. I’m taking just a couple clips. He complains that I’m not doing a deep dive on the church fathers or that I’m not quoting the biblical passages about predestination in a video that is neither about the church fathers nor about predestination. And look, it would be insane for me in this video to complain that in redeemed zoomer response to me, he quotes me rather than quoting the catechism or the cons of Trent. I mean, after all, he’s responding to me explicitly. He’s not claiming all Catholics agree with me. So surely redeemed zoomer isn’t going to claim that responding to these enormously influential Calvinist preachers like Spro and MacArthur would be the same as just finding a random person on the street, right?
CLIP:
I’m going to fly to Peru. I’m going to talk to a random Catholic on the street, and I’m going to use that dude as my authority for my views on Catholicism. Next time I make a video on Catholicism, I’m joking. I wouldn’t actually do that because I try to be intellectually honest here.
Joe:
So now he’s actually claiming it’s intellectually dishonest for me to respond to Roland MacArthur. Now, that’s a hefty allegation, and I cannot fathom why he feels justified slinging it my way, but let’s consider his argument first, redeem Zoomer is right that it’s not fair to take a random Catholic and pretend that their theology is the theology of the Catholic church. And because the Catholic church is a visible institution with the magisterium, we can actually say what Catholics do and don’t believe agree with it or not. There’s a clear sense of an official Catholic teaching that’s a lot trickier to do with the loose intellectual and religious movement like Calvinism. So Calvinists are free to say that the Calvinists they disagree with aren’t true Calvinists. There’s even an ongoing dispute about whether John Calvin himself would be considered a Calvinist in the strict sense. But still, it would be unfair to say that MacArthur and Sproul represent all Calvinism. That is the straw man that redeem Zoomer accuses me of seemingly. But not only am I not making that argument, I literally begin the video with a disclaimer that I’m not making the argument. So what do you call it when somebody makes a response video accusing you of a position that you explicitly are arguing against and not arguing for?
CLIP:
So a strong man fallacy occurs when someone takes your argument, claim or opinion, and distorts it into some kind of extreme version, and then after that, they attack that extremist version as if that was really the argument you were making.
Joe:
But also is redeem zoomer serious that Spro and MacArthur are no more influential in the world of Calvinism than a random Peruvian guy on the street would be in the world of Catholicism? Two of the biggest Bible studies in the reformed world in terms of study Bibles are the MacArthur study Bible, John MacArthur’s obviously, and the Reformation Study Bible, which was edited by RC Sproul. Now, whether redeem zoomer or I like it or not, those guys are enormously influential, and once you recognize that the uneducated Peruvian on the street is an absurd comparison point to RC Sproul who founded Masters Seminary or John MacArthur, then you should see that the rest of his complaint here is absurd as well. Because look, if some massively influential prominent Catholic, let’s say a Bishop Barron or Father Mike Schmitz was big online following, said something dangerously heretical and redeem Zoomer called it out and even said like, Hey, I’m not saying all Catholics believe this.
You may or may not agree with that, but this is what these guys are saying that’d be completely valid. That is not a straw man that would be building up the kingdom. So look, what’s going on here at the heart of the issue is the fact that redeem zoomer seemingly wants to do some gatekeeping. He wants to decide who does and doesn’t get to call themselves Calvinist. Now, he could simply say, that’s not my flavor of Calvinism, and here’s how your critique of those guys does or does not apply to my own belief system. But he doesn’t do that. Instead, he just claims that Spro and MacArthur are literally not Calvinist. He doesn’t bother defending those claims in his reply video except to claim that they’re both historian Baptist, which they’re not. For one thing, SPRO is pretty famously a Presbyterian who debated against John MacArthur on the issue of baptism.
But moreover, what people, including scholars typically mean by Calvinist involves whether or not they accept the five points of tulip derived from the Senate of Dordt, a belief in total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. Not only are MacArthur and Sproul clearly Calvinist by this standard definition, but John MacArthur literally wrote the afterward to the 40th edition version of the book, the Five Points of Calvinism Defined, defended, and Documented. Now, look, redeem Zoomer is right that at least MacArthur, I don’t know about Spro at least MacArthur would disagree with other positions classically held by Calvinists, particularly on sacramental theology. But as DG Hart points out in his book, Calvinism a History, the Swiss reformers were themselves somewhat divided on sacramental theology from the start, including disagreements between John Calvin and Heinrich Bollinger, the latter of whom wrote the Tic confessions.
So big Calvinists disagreed with each other on sacramental theology from day one. So I would just say this, whether you think they’re good or bad, Calvinists asserting that they’re not Calvinists at all is wild stuff. You’re at least arguing a very fringe kind of reinterpretation of the word Calvinism in a way. Ordinary people and scholars don’t usually use it and illustrate the kind of ordinary person use of that. I asked Chad, GPT who the most famous Calvinists of the last 50 years were, and it told me j Packer, who I don’t know if Redeem Zimmer would accept because he’s an Anglican, and in his video zoomer argued that it had to be from a historically reformed denomination, which Anglicanism is not, even though it’s always had a reformed influence. Second is literally Rcpr. Second most famous Calvinist of the last 50 years according to Chad, GPT.
Third is John Piper, who is another Baptist. Fourth is Tim Keller. Maybe Tim Keller is okay, but he did some work with the Gospel Coalition, so I don’t know. Fifth is Wayne Grham, who’s a subordination is. So I doubt he’s going to want to claim him as a legitimate Calvinist if he’s not going to claim MacArthur. And Sproul. Sixth is DA Carson who founded the Gospel Coalition, which he complains about me using Seventh is Moeller, who is another reformed Baptist, and then eighth is Schaeffer Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984 before I was born ninth, Kevin de Young who has the gospel coalition again, and then 10th Alvin Plant, who I don’t actually know his denominational affiliation, I think he might count, but that’s maybe two, three guys out of the 10 most famous Calvinists of the last 50 years that redeem Zoomer would even acknowledge as Calvinists at all.
If you made a list of the 10 most famous Catholics, and I said, I think 70% of those people aren’t even Catholic, then you’d just be like, whatever your meaning of the word Catholic is, is so idiosyncratic that it doesn’t match what ordinary people mean by these words. But in any case, there are a ton of Christians who call themselves Calvinists, who follow teachers like Spro and MacArthur, and I think it is worth responding to them and the bad theology that they’re peddling and believing in, but somehow redeem Zoomer pretends that my doing that is the same thing as me slandering an entire denomination, a denomination he doesn’t name, because it doesn’t happen.
CLIP:
Unlike Joe Hess Meyer, I don’t judge other denominations based on the average street level understanding of them. I judge them based on the official confessions, and there is nothing in any of the Roman Catholic ecumenical councils or infallible papal statements that would exclude an Augustinian view of double predestination, and that’s all that Calvinism is.
Joe:
Now, hold on again, he’s just accused me of judging an entire denomination based upon the average street level understanding of a random person. Not only is that allegation charitable and baseless, what denomination am I judging? I’m not the one who accused the whole PCA of being Baptist, for instance. And two, what street level person are we talking about MacArthur and sprawl? So I think the issue is this. He started his reply video before he knew what the video was even about. By assuming that it was going to be one where I lumped all Calvinists together and critiqued predestination, and after watching a video in which I did neither of those things, he ends the video by asserting that I did both of them. And by the way, if he’s right that all Calvinism is is a belief in double predestination, that completely undermines his argument that MacArthur and Sproul who believe in double predestination don’t get to be real Calvinists.
It’s obviously, I think it’s fair to say that redeem Zoomers criticisms are charitable baseless and ill-informed they’re just factually wrong. Repeatedly, he suggests that I hold positions I explicitly don’t hold. He accuses me of being the one who creates strawman while holding strawman views of arguments. I clearly articulate, but I do think there’s something redeemable in redeem Zoomer position. He clearly wishes that he had a church that was capable of policing orthodoxy, of establishing clear doctrine so you could figure out who was and wasn’t an Orthodox member of the denomination or church, and that it didn’t just turn on the cult of popularity about who the most popular YouTube preacher was. I’m sympathetic to all of that In his Reconquista project, Zoomer has argued that you should stay with historic denominational institutions. Even if you disagree with the teachings, even if you disagree with the preaching and whatever you think of that argument, the only logical place to end up there is to reject the reformation.
There’s no coherent way that I see of saying, yes, it is bad when conservative Presbyterians break away from liberal Presbyterians because they should hold on to the denomination they grew up in and are part of, and this is schism. But then also say, well, it’s fine when Martin Luther does it, or It’s fine when John Calvin does it, and you can say, oh, Luther was excommunicated. I think that’s a silly argument. Calvin wasn’t. He left on his own. So I would say this to you, redeem Zoomer. I appreciate the feedback. I wish you had watched the video and maybe absorbed it a little better before you tried to make a reply, but I appreciate you engaging with it. I hope this is the start of a longer term interaction between us. I’d love to sit down with you and I think you should continue this quest.
I think that anyone who is similarly disposed who says, you know what? This theology out there being pedaled by people like Spro and MacArthur is vacuous. There’s got to be more. I want to draw on the tradition. That’s a good impulse, but I wouldn’t settle for a 500 year old tradition like Calvinism. I would go for something deeper, richer, and older and wanting to be part of a church that actually has boundaries and can police doctrine has clear principles of orthodoxy in heresy. I would invite you to join that church, and I said that not only to redeem Zoomer, but to any of you watching who might be in a similar sort of spot, it’s not a straw man to say they’re Protestants pedaling bad ideas. You might disagree with those ideas or not. Thankfully, on some of them, redeem Zoomer disagreed with Sproul and MacArthur.
I don’t know, because he never really got into the substance of my critique what he would say in response to what I’m actually arguing. In the original video, those three points, he doesn’t ever touch ’em. He actually, if you can watch ’em in the video, skip my entire third part where I lay out how this is a logical contradiction, and he just says, well, let me know if I missed anything important. You did. You missed the crux of the argument. That’s fine. But there you go. I would say, I think Calvinism in its forms that at least as articulated by people like S Brolin MacArthur has real logical and theological problems that might apply to you might not. Either way, the incoherence of policing the boundaries and all of that, this constant gatekeeping of who gets to call themselves an Evangelical or a Calvinist or whatever. We can avoid all of this in a really simple way by just being members of one church as we were meant to be. So I would leave you with that appeal. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.