Tag: Justification

McAtee Contra Jay Dyer’s Offerings On Justification On Tucker’s Show – II

McAtee Contra Jay Dyer’s Offerings On Justification On Tucker’s Show – I

Tucker Carlson interviewed Jay Dyer. Many years ago on EZ Boards Jay Dyer and I crossed swords more than once. Jay Dyer at one time thought he was a Calvinist but clearly he never was and this interview demonstrates that. Dyer set up a straw man of what Calvinism is, and then proceeded to tear the straw man down.

Jay Dyer said on Tucker’s show,

It’s (Calvinism) also Christologically errant in that the whole idea of what salvation is. (Calvinist’s hold) ultimately (to) one’s legal standing in terms of what’s called justification by faith alone or penal substitutionary atonement. This idea that you’re justified by God through a sort of notional acceptance of a set of ideas and then God’s attitude towards you changes. So it’s dispositional but it’s not focused on an actual ontological change in the person. (Eastern Orthodoxy is very different. God’s disposition is based not on purely a legal stance but on your actual ontological change.

Bret Responds,

1.) Right out of the gate Jay demonstrates that he never understood what Calvinism is, even though he claims he once was a Calvinist. No Calvinist says that justification and salvation are exactly synonyms. For the Calvinist salvation is all God’s Work via election, regeneration, justification, sanctification and glorification. All of that together defines salvation. So, when Jay insists that for the Calvinists salvation = justification he just demonstrates he doesn’t know what he is talking about and so he is building a strawman.

2.) Next Dyer complains about penal substitutionary atonement and the Reformed doctrine of Justification by faith alone. Now, keep in mind here that these doctrines teach that God alone does all the saving. For Jay to denigrate the clear Scriptural truth that God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5) Jay has to own that his position is that God only justifies the godly. Yet, that is precisely contrary to what Scripture explicitly teaches.

“But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.” Romans 4:5

“Know that a man is not justified by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” Galatians 2:16
 
“He has saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but by His own purpose and by the grace He granted us in Christ Jesus before time began.” II Timothy 1:9

So, Jay Dyer can bleat all he wants about Nominalism, William of Ockham, Gabriel Biel, etc. but at the end of the bleating stands the testimony of Scripture that Dyer’s Eastern Orthodoxy denies. What Dyer and Eastern Orthodoxy want to reach for is salvation by theosis. In theosis the Eastern Orthodox turn justification into a process whereby via our cooperation with grace we contribute to the final realization of our divinization so that God justifies us because we are just. Clearly, there is, for Eastern Orthodoxy and Jay Dyer a required cooperation with grace, which turns grace into not grace. After all, grace is defined as God’s unmerited favor to the ungodly.

3.) Dyer’s complaint reduces here to the age old canard accusation that the Reformers were involved in a “legal fiction.” This accusation finds its anchor in the idea that somehow it is not proper of God to pass a legal declaration upon the ungodly that they are righteous for the sake of Christ’s finished work being imputed to them upon irresistible grace given faith. In brief, Eastern Orthodoxy, like Roman Catholicism and Arminian Protestantism hates the juridical/legal realities that are everywhere spoken in Scripture. Justification is a legal term. In Romans 8 we are told that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” The idea of an absence of condemnation is juridical/legal language.

The problem that Jay has here is he is once again, ignoring the Scriptures. It is not Jay’s supposed realism that explains Scripture. Nor is it nominalism that Jay complains about. Scripture interprets Scripture and Scripture clearly says in Romans 4:17

“I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

God, by His grace alone, calls into existence the righteous who are of themselves ungodly and He does so by a legal declaration of our righteousness because of Christ’s finished work on the Cross.

4.) Jay again demonstrates his cluelessness about what Calvinism (and so the Scriptures) teach by injecting all this nonsense about how our notional acceptance causes God to change His disposition towards us.

a.) First, God never changes His disposition towards us. Jay forgets that God’s people have been elect since eternity and that even while we were still sinners Christ died for His people. The idea that we do something (accept notional ideas) that forces God to change his disposition towards us defies the teaching of Scripture.

but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Romans 5:8

The reason that Christ died for us is because we were already, even as sinners, set apart for justification (salvation). God does not love us because we accepted notional ideas about God. Rather we accepted notional ideas about God because God loved us from all eternity.

Ephesians 2:4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 

The “us” here in this passage is the elect. God’s great love has never been absent from the elect. Even when under the wrath of God, the wrath of God was grace intended to chase those whom God’s never started to love (because they were loved from eternity) to God’s grace of forgiveness.

4.) Finally, on this quote, Dyer, never really being a Calvinist, despite his claims, fails to take into account that salvation in the Calvinist (that is Biblical) understanding incudes union with Christ and regeneration. Salvation, for Biblical Christians is not only legal (though it certainly is legal) but it is also ontological. Before Christ, because of our sin nature all we can do all the time is sin. Upon Union with Christ we are given a new nature and now because we have the Holy Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing that which is to come we now can say “no” to sin as we continue to put off the old man and put on the new man created in Christ Jesus. So, in the Calvinist view there is ontological change … there is a change in nature however, that change in nature is not theosis in the Eastern Orthodox sense. There will always be a creator creature distinction, even in our glorification, though we are pleased to admit that we are being transformed in this life from glory unto glory.

Jay Dyer was never a Calvinist, though he might have thought he was. Jay Dyer may not even be a Christian though he thinks he is. The denial of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone is a denial that finds one on thin ice before a thrice Holy God. Jay’s belief that he can, via a process, eventually be justified because he is just threatens his eternity. It is my prayer that Jay would one day become a genuine Calvinist and give up his synergistic efforts to become what he never can become without God’s legal declaration of Christ’s righteousness imputed to Jay.