Two Angry Calvinists

   Liberty University has a “Christmas Convocation” each year that, I’m told, can be quite humorous. This year, yours truly got to have a part. Oh, well, only by parody, but yes, I had a part. Evidently, they did a version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and for number two, they had “Two Angry Calvinists.” Of course, if Dr. Ascol and I are angry, I truly wonder what “Calvinists are worse than Muslims” means? Anyway, according to an eye witness account sent to me this morning, two folks came out on stage during the “two angry Calvinists” portion; they were followed by someone shouting, “God loves you, but He doesn’t love you.”
   Now, there are plenty of things one could look to over the past year about which to chuckle regarding Liberty and its anti-Calvinist crusade. John Gill a Presbyterian. There’s one that should make you laugh as loudly as Bishop Spong not knowing who J.C. Ryle was. “Calvinists are worse than Muslims.” There’s one that will go down in history. “I’ll be standing on my…hands…standing on my feet…standing on a stump” is another one. There are lots of them. But as the cover art Ergun Caner posted a while back demonstrates, for something to be funny, it has to have an element of truth in it. It simply isn’t funny when it is based upon a lie, or willful and continual ignorance.
   So I’m honored to have had a part in Liberty’s celebration, however–I’m not an angry Calvinist. In fact, I think it is pretty obvious that when it comes to this topic, the anger and emotion is found in Ergun and Emir Caner. I would once again encourage any fair minded person to listen to the presentation made on this topic at our national conference in November and ask yourself a simple question: who is dependent upon emotion and rhetoric, and who seeks to present a biblical, cogent, consistent, truth-honoring theology?
   Even at that, I would not be able to work “two angry synergists” into my rendition of the Twelve Days of Christmas. I would have to come up with something along the lines of “an entire administration afraid of allowing for open and free academic debate on a biblical subject of tremendous importance” and I’m afraid getting that to fit and rhyme is way beyond me.