Some time ago we published an Italian translation of Thomas Taylor’s A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism, a pamphlet first printed in Leeds in 1780 under the pseudonym “Philalethes, lately escaped”.1 We said at the time that we hold neither Arminian nor Calvinistic convictions, and we meant it. A thoughtful reader from the Reformed tradition wrote to ask, in effect, why we had bothered. The objections were courteous and they were serious, and they are the objections most Reformed readers will have. They are worth answering in public.
Distilled, they come to four.
- The pamphlet is an aggressive attack on Reformed theology, evident from the title onward, and its value is at best historical.
- The “ten horns” of Revelation 12–13 refer to Satan’s destructive power against Christ, not to the biblical interpretation of sixteenth-century reformers.
- The tension between human responsibility and divine sovereignty is a mystery we are not meant to resolve (Romans 11:33–34), and in trying to refute what he took for heresy Taylor undermined the core of the Christian message, which is the sovereignty of God.
- J. I. Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God shows how election and evangelism cohere, and ought to settle the matter.
We take them in order.
The tone
The pamphlet is aggressive by our standards. It was not by the standards of its own day. The first edition drew a reply the same year from a writer signing himself “Calvinisticus”, under the title Calvinism Defended, and Arminianism Refuted.2 That was the genre. Wesley’s sermon Free Grace (1739) had already called unconditional election “the horrible decree”, borrowing Calvin’s own phrase,3 and Toplady had answered Wesley with An Old Fox Tarr’d and Feather’d (1775). Men on both sides wrote this way because they believed the stakes were eternal, and they were right about the stakes even where they were wrong about the manners. Taylor himself (1738–1816) was one of Wesley’s itinerant preachers and twice President of the Methodist Conference: a serious man writing in a rough century, not a crank.
But the tone is not why we translated it. The subtitle is. Taylor writes as a man who had been inside the system and came out of it bruised, and his account of what the system does to people is the reason the pamphlet is still worth reading: the anxiety about whether one is elect, the inability to say plainly to a sinner “Christ died for you”, the hardness of heart that creeps in when one has to defend a God who ordains reprobation. That account matches, again and again, what we hear from people who come to us out of Reformed churches today. Not every Reformed believer fits the portrait; some of the most gracious Christians we know are Reformed, and they will not recognise themselves in it. But the average case is real, and we hold that it is not an accident of temperament but a consequence of the doctrine. A theology that must qualify “God so loved the world” cannot, in the long run, produce people who love as Christ loved.
The title
Taylor is not claiming that Calvinism fulfils Revelation 13. He borrows a familiar image of something harmful with many points and uses it as a frame for ten propositions he considers harmful. It is a rhetorical device, in the same way a Puritan might title a tract against drunkenness “The Seven Heads of Intemperance” without meaning that the tavern is the Beast. The reading of the horns in Revelation 12–13 as Satan’s power against Christ is fair as far as it goes, though in 17:12 John identifies them as ten kings. It is also beside the point, because Taylor is not offering an exegesis of Revelation at all.
Sovereignty and responsibility
Here the disagreement is real, and it is worth saying why rather than simply registering it.
The “tension” exists only if sovereignty is first defined as meticulous, exhaustive predetermination of every event and every choice. Scripture never defines it that way; to be sovereign is to be the ultimate authority, not the only agent. Scripture shows a God who announces his purposes and brings them to pass (Isaiah 46:10–11), who overrules human schemes (Psalm 33:10–11; Proverbs 19:21), who turns the brothers’ evil into Joseph’s deliverance without having authored the evil (Genesis 50:20). In none of these does his rule require that every creaturely act be decreed or that the human will be bound. He acts in history as an agent among agents, with the difference that he knows everything and can do anything, so no human choice can frustrate his plan and none needs to be pre-scripted for the plan to succeed. That is a far stronger conception of sovereignty than the Reformed one, not a weaker one. The Reformed God can only be sure of the outcome by fixing the inputs. The God of the Bible is sure of the outcome however many variables there are.
And Scripture plainly holds that people can and must respond. Christ weeps over a Jerusalem that “would not” (Matthew 23:37); he says to men who searched the Scriptures, “you refuse to come to me” (John 5:40); Stephen tells the council they “always resist the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:51); Luke says the Pharisees “rejected the counsel of God for themselves” (Luke 7:30). Those texts are unintelligible if the will is in bondage until regenerated, and equally unintelligible if the Spirit’s work cannot be resisted. Arminianism, for what it is worth, shares much of the same problem in a lighter form: it accepts the premise of a bound will and merely makes the enabling grace universal and resistible, when the texts above never posit the bondage in the first place.
Jesus himself describes the Spirit’s work: he convicts the world of sin, righteousness and judgment (John 16:8–11). The world, not the elect; and conviction, not regeneration. Conviction is by nature something one can yield to or push against, which is exactly what Stephen’s audience did. There is no “effectual call” in the passage, nor anywhere else that we can find; there is a Spirit who presses the truth on every hearer and hearers who answer for what they do with it. The command to believe (John 3:16–18; Acts 16:31; 17:30) presupposes the ability to obey it. Where there is no tension in the text, one should ask who introduced it.
On Romans 11:33–34
This is the passage most often quoted to close the discussion, and it does not do what it is asked to do. Paul is not throwing up his hands over the compatibility of divine decree and human freedom. He has just spent three chapters explaining exactly how God worked: Israel stumbled, the Gentiles came in, and Israel’s provocation to jealousy will bring her back, so that God “has consigned all to disobedience that he may have mercy on all” (11:32). The doxology praises a plan Paul has just laid out in some detail, and the plan is one of mercy widening to include everyone. To take a passage whose whole argument is “God’s ways are more merciful and more inclusive than you thought”, and use it to shield a doctrine that God’s ways are more exclusive than they appear, is to turn it against itself.
On the core of the message
The claim that Taylor undermines the very core of the Christian message, namely God’s sovereignty, is the point at which we would ask a Reformed reader to pause. When Paul defines the gospel he received and delivered, it is that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose (1 Corinthians 15:1–4). When John states why the Son was sent, it is that God loved the world (John 3:16; 1 John 4:9–10). When Paul tells Timothy what God wants, it is that all people be saved (1 Timothy 2:4); when John names the scope of the propitiation, it is the whole world (1 John 2:2). Sovereignty, correctly understood, is a true attribute of God. It is not the gospel. A message whose centre is God’s control rather than God’s love for every person will, inevitably, produce a church that mirrors its centre.
Packer
Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God is well written and, in substance, no better than the rest of the Reformed defence. Its “antinomy” is a device: one first asserts that God decrees all things, then notices that Scripture everywhere addresses people as free and responsible, and then declares the collision a mystery to be reverenced rather than a premise to be examined.4 If the first assertion is dropped, and Scripture does not make it, there is nothing left to reconcile. That is precisely the point. The tension between sovereignty and free will is a problem Reformed theology introduces itself. It does not exist in the text.
A book in return
For readers who want to test where the Reformed premise came from, we recommend Ken Wilson’s The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism (2019).5 It is the short, lay version of his Oxford doctorate, published in full by Mohr Siebeck in 2018.6 Wilson did something nobody had done before: he read Augustine’s entire surviving corpus, works, sermons and letters, in chronological order, and traced when and why his view of the will changed. His finding is that the doctrines Calvin later systematised — a will incapable of faith, faith as a gift infused into the elect, unconditional predestination of individuals — do not appear in any Christian writer before Augustine, and appear in Augustine himself only from 412 onward, after decades in which he had argued the opposite against the Manichaeans. Wilson’s case is that the sources of the change were Stoic, Neoplatonic and Manichaean rather than exegetical. Not everyone accepts his conclusion, but the evidence he lays out is the primary texts themselves, and the book is 143 pages.
Why it matters pastorally
None of this is written to win an argument. It is written because people arrive at our door carrying a question that no believer should have to carry: am I among those God chose? The New Testament never puts the question that way. It asks whether one has believed the message that Christ died for our sins and rose again, and it promises life to everyone who has (John 5:24; 6:47). That promise is not qualified by a hidden decree. It is the whole point of the gospel that there is nothing hidden about it.
If you come from a Reformed background and have felt the anxiety Taylor describes, the remedy is not a different system. It is to read the promises as they are written, addressed to “whoever”, and to take God at his word.
- Thomas Taylor, A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism (Leeds, 1780; 4th ed. corrected, Leeds: James Nichols, 1819). The 1819 edition is available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28172. ↩︎
- “Calvinisticus”, Calvinism Defended, and Arminianism Refuted: or, Remarks on a Pamphlet (Lately Publish’d) by Philalethes, Entitled, A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism (Leeds, 1780). ↩︎
- John Wesley, Free Grace (Bristol, 1739), Sermon 110 in the standard numbering; Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.23.7 (decretum quidem horribile, fateor). ↩︎
- J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (London: IVP, 1961), ch. 2. ↩︎
- Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism (independently published, 2019). ↩︎
- Kenneth M. Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion from Traditional Free Choice to “Non-free Free Will”: A Comprehensive Methodology, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 111 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018). ↩︎