If you're a Calvinist, and you come across any of my posts like this one, please do not think that I am attacking you personally, because I'm not. Nor am I putting into question the Christian distinctives of your faith (God forbid!) like the Gospel as Paul describes it in 1Cor 15:3-4. What I am trying to do is open your eyes to Calvinistic distintinctives, which are Gnostic in origin. Take this picture below, which contains an actual quote that he said. In your heart of hearts, can you even agree with that? Seriously? Beyond The Fundamentals is really doing a good job in clearing the cobwebs from Calvinistic proof texts and letting the text simply say what it's contextually saying. I encourage you to check their YouTube videos out.

But isn't Calvinism harmless, you may ask? Think about what it teaches. It teaches that God misrepresents Himself, that He is the source of evil as well as good, and that He has already chosen whom to save and whom to damn. This makes the God of the bible and the Christian message, as Calvinism depicts them, repulsive to people and makes it super easy for Christians to leave the faith. Harmless?

Let me put it another way: If the Church fathers earlier to, or ahead of, Augustin were strongly contending against the teachings of Gnostism which was trying to infiltrate the Church, how come Augustin and those who followed his teachings stopped doing so? Did this heresy just disappear? Or already privily imbedded into church doctrine? Whereas the earlier versions of Gnosticism denied the deity of Christ (that He was just a demiurge) and denied His coming in the flesh (He was supposedly just a "phantom" and not real flesh), these have been modified to be more palatable to Christians. The Gnostic distinctives that remain are the pagan fatalism of personal fate and that all flesh is evil (as opposed to all spirit is good, which makes Satan what?). The latter became the T in tulip, and from this distinctive cascades all the other "doctrines" that protect this Gnostic distinctive. And if you don't believe it, "you don't believe in the sovereignty of God," you are a "will-worshipping semi-Pelagian," an "Armenian," an "open theist," a "universalist" and an "arrogant devil." All to distract you from referring to what the bible actually says about these matters. Much like Leftists blurt out "racist," "misogynist," "bigot," etc when you do not agree with them.

This neo-Gnostic distinctive of "total depravity" is the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. It is where God, in Calvinist teaching, starts to have two wills and begins to be the source of everything, including all that is evil in the world ("everything that comes to pass" ). If Augustin and Calvin were wrong about infant baptism (among other things), then it follows that you should not make either one your infallible pope and you outsourcing your sense-making to them.