James Anderson on Calvinism and the First Sin
James Anderson was kind enough to share a chapter of an upcoming book he’s working on. ( link ) The chapter is titled Calvinism and the First Sin and the book will be titled Calvinism and the Problem of Evil. Dr. Anderson will remove the online version once the book is published, so read it while you can. Dr. Anderson addresses the challenges unique to Calvinism regarding the problem of evil including: 1) God’s determining the first sin makes Him the author of sin, 2) Calvinists must be compatiblists and there are some fairly strong arguments against compatibilism, and 3) and given Adam’s good nature, there’s no causal explanation for the first sin. To his credit, Dr. Anderson openly embraces the idea that Calvinism is indeed divine determinism. Now in true Van Tillian fashion, he spends a great deal of time explaining what this does not mean without elaborating on what it does mean. Dr. Anderson argues that Calvinists need not be causal determinists. Curiously, his rea