Can You Prove Calvinism to be True Apart from Pauline Scriptures?

Les Lanphere has decided to try and prove Calvinism without using scriptures written by the Apostle Paul.  I like this and think it’s a good challenge since he brings out scriptures found in the gospels and non-Pauline epistles.  So if you’re one of those who say that we only get our theology from Paul, then here you go, scriptures spoken by Jesus and NOT Paul.

Here’s his introduction with links to follow to the other parts in his series…

I meet with a good friend, Andrew, every Wednesday morning for an hour at Bob Evans, to talk about God. When we started our get-togethers,  I was still attending Calvary Chapel. He wanted to hear me out on my disagreements with Calvary’s theology, and what direction I was going in. It’s been an awesome blessing to be able to talk to someone who doesn’t agree with me on everything, but is willing to hear me out and honestly debate. The purpose is to edify eachother, to hold eachother accountable to consistent Biblical theology, and for each of us to know what we believe, and why we believe it. It’s really become a highlight of my week.

So naturally, when I started to hear James White linger on the topic of Calvary Chapel for a few episodes of his radio show The Dividing Line, I shared it with Andrew to see what he thought. Here’s a clip from one of the episodes.

In the clip one of the Calvary guys says, “I’ve often said about Calvinism, that it’s Christianity without Jesus. They just take certain statements of Paul and read their own theology into it.”.

Andrew thought it was an interesting statement, and thought it might make an interesting challenge.  I know him well enough to know that he doesn’t have any malicious thoughts in mind. He doesn’t think that ‘red letters’ have more canonical weight, or that I’m misunderstanding Paul. But, as lots of non-reformed Christians point out, we do rely a lot on Paul. So he has challenged me to prove Calvinism without Paul. It sounds like a lot of fun, so I accepted.

He allowed me the gospels, Acts 1-8, James, Jude, Revelation, and 1 & 2 Peter. I countered with the fact that just because Paul is IN Acts shouldn’t exclude it. Since Acts was written by Luke it’s not a Pauline work. He agreed.

Basically I’m looking for election, absolute sovereignty, man’s inability, etc. After starting to look through random new testament books, and seeing the overwhelming amount of texts, I realized we wouldn’t be able do it in just a week or two.  So each week we’ll look at one book, starting tomorrow with Matthew. I’ll post my findings here. Maybe a top 5 texts from each book, along with a list of all the rest from that book. If I miss any, hit me up. (Source)

Part 1 – Book of Matthew

Part 2 – Book of Mark

Part 3 – Book of Luke

Part 4 – Book of John

Part 5 – Book of Acts

Tagged as: apostle paul, biblical theology, calvary chapel, Calvinism, Christianity, dividing line, doctrines of grace, effectual grace, God, God saves, Jesus, limited atonement, Monergism, perseverance of the saints, predestination, reformed christians, scriptures, sovereignty, total depravity, unconditional election