Calvinism on a gentler form of damnation

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]I've been been making a few videos recently about Calvinism. I wanted to dive in a bit deeper on the distinction between active and passive decrees of reprobation.

[00:00:14]Hold on if that doesn't make sense to you and you haven't watched the previous video, I will explain what I mean by that.

[00:00:20]First of all, I just want to give the the bigger picture here that Calvinists at a popular level often haven't really wrestled with the abject moral horror of the position that they are endorsing. And this is because Calvinism itself has a whole range of ways of deflecting from that moral horror, at least when people are in the shallow end of the pool of the Calvinist pool. Once people become more thoroughly indoctrinated into a Calvinist And by the way, I'm not assuming that every Calvinist is indoctrinated. I do believe many are. I believe that they are indoctrinated into for example, conflating a Calvinist hermeneutic of the Bible with the Bible.

[00:01:05]This is a perennial danger for every theological position where you can no longer see that your view of the Bible is in fact an interpretation and where you've collapsed the interpreter, that is you, into the Bible itself. When that happens, you can no longer critically analyze and reflect on your own interpretation because you've come to the point of just thinking, "Well, that's just is what the Bible says and there's no other possible reasonable interpretation of it."

[00:01:35]And this can happen as I said to anybody, but it very much can happen to Calvinists in part because Calvinism is a tight system.

[00:01:45]Once you get locked into the system and you accept the presuppositions of the system, it can be very hard to think outside of that box and you can come into the danger of just conflating that system with the Bible itself and with Christian doctrine itself.

[00:02:01]And when that happens, then when you come into encounter some of the the more morally problematic dimensions of Calvinism, such as how it decimates the divine nature, how it decimates sense of human autonomy and free will, well, you now have because you've got the system, you have to work within that system, then you've got to find various ways to deflect or to rationalize or to come up with some explanation for the divine nature and human free will or human autonomy or human existence, etc. Okay. So, with that in mind, I talked in a previous video a little bit more about the distinction between two different versions of Calvinism.

[00:02:44]One of them is you can say it's the softer version.

[00:02:49]It's a view where God chooses the reprobate, chooses those who will be damned forever, not by actively decreeing that they be reprobate, but rather by passing them over for salvation, by not actively willing for their salvation.

[00:03:08]Whereas then there's also a more robust um austere, perhaps bitter, doctrine version of Calvinism in which God does not simply pass over the reprobate for salvation, but God actively wills their damnation in parallel to God actively willing the salvation of the elect.

[00:03:32]And that view is seen, as I said, more austere, perhaps more bitter, because on that view God is choosing in a very personal sense that God desires to save one individual or one group, saying, "I love these people. I want to bless these people and elect them to salvation so that they can be objects of mercy and experience resurrection life for eternity.

[00:03:56]And this other group, I actively will them to be damned, to be subject to eternal torture and punishment forever as an object of my justice and an exemplar of that justice to the elect.

[00:04:14]And that is a pretty horrifying picture for most people who have not or are not already had their moral intuitions, I would say, corrupted by Calvinist theology.

[00:04:25]So, to take the passive view can seem to be a gentler introduction to Calvinism, where God does not actively will people to damnation. But God simply passes over some people and wills to save other people. But God did not actively will their damnation.

[00:04:43]And that is, to my mind, a fallacious view. It's an indefensible view. It does nothing actually to make Calvinism any less austere or bitter or to be more blunt, horrifying than the active reprobation view.

[00:05:00]And to make that point, I'm going to give you an illustration from, of all things, bioethics.

[00:05:07]It's a famous thought experiment uh that was popularized by um ethicist philosopher named James Rachels.

[00:05:16]Now, he was talking about the distinction between active and passive euthanasia. And I'm going to present the argument he makes with respect to active and passive euthanasia.

[00:05:27]Although I'm not really interested in discussing the distinction between active and passive euthanasia here, I simply want to co-opt the illustration at that point for our distinction between active election to damnation versus a passive election to damnation.

[00:05:43]So, here's the illustration.

[00:05:46]Um in this um, let's say Smith wants to inherit the estate of their grandmother, Grandma Smith.

[00:05:57]So, uh, there are two different scenarios in which Smith can inherit the estate of Grandma Smith knowing that they're already on the will.

[00:06:05]In the first scenario Smith goes into the bathroom, sees Grandma Smith in the bathtub forces Grandma Smith's head below the water and holds it below the water while Grandma Smith drowns.

[00:06:20]So, Smith actively willed Grandma Smith's death her murder by holding her head under the water.

[00:06:29]In the second scenario, Smith walks into the bathroom and at that point when he walks into the bathroom, Grandma Smith slips in the tub, bumps her head, becomes unconscious, and slips beneath the water line and drowns.

[00:06:44]And Smith wanting her death does nothing to pull her out of the water or resuscitate her, rather he allows her to drown. He waits until she's clearly dead before he then calls the authorities.

[00:07:00]So, on this account, you have in the first scenario Smith actively drowning Grandma, and in the second scenario Smith passively passively observing Grandma drown Grandma drown Grandma drown.

[00:07:13]Uh, but doing nothing to stop it because he wants her dead.

[00:07:19]The question is this, is there a moral distinction between those two scenarios or in each case is Smith essentially culpable for murder? And Rachel's point is that if your intuition support the conclusion that in both cases Smith is complicit in murder, in one case through actively killing Grandma, in the second case by way of allowing her to die while wanting her dead, then it's a moral distinction without a difference.

[00:07:49]Um James Rachels now wants to apply that to the distinction between active and passive euthanasia and argue that there isn't really a distinction. Now, the way that Rachels wants to take that, just as a sidebar, is not to argue against passive euthanasia, but rather to argue for active euthanasia. Let's set that aside. It's not really part of our discussion here, but let's just apply that now to God in election.

[00:08:15]By analogy, on election, on this account of election, on the passive on the active view, God is actively drowning people in order to secure their damnation as the primary cause, the primary will by which he wills that they reject him, they then reject him, and he does not will otherwise, and so they are damned actively through his decree.

[00:08:37]On the passive view, God does not actively will that they reject him, but does not offer the means of salvation to redeem them. He actively withholds that, intentionally withholds that, in exact parallel to Smith actively withholding uh the ability to raise the grandma above the waterline resuscitator and save her from drowning.

[00:08:58]And if Smith is culpable for drowning grandma, then analogously, God is culpable for damning people to hell passively.

[00:09:10]Um so that that's the distinction. The argument here is that there is no significant moral distinction between God actively willing the damnation of people and God passively willing the damnation of people.

[00:09:25]So, uh to conclude, uh there isn't really a distinction it's a distinction without a difference. As an analogy I made in the past, it is like passive the the passive approach to election to to reprobation on Calvinism is like smoking light cigarettes. Right?

[00:09:43]You think you're getting less nicotine.

[00:09:46]You think you're getting less theological toxins by taking a passive view of God's election to reprobation.

[00:09:53]But in fact, there is no distinction practically speaking. Light cigarettes still end up being just as toxic as regular cigarettes.

[00:10:03]And by analogy analogy, the passive view ends up being just as theologically toxic as the active view.