"All Sin is Equal" Refuting Protestantism

[Kreuzritter]

They retain moral culpability in a sense, but at base, tend to believe that every action is evil or sinful due to man's fallen state, i.e. even purportedly good actions are tainted with sin. That's the upshot of total depravity. It doesn't necessarily follow from this that all sin is equally offensive to God, but within this system that is the correlated principle.

They retain it in no sense but in word only. There is no moral culpability without free will, and there is no sin or just punishment for it without moral culpabiltiy.

Further, their talk of actions being "evil" is essentially meaningless, having defined "good" as being whatever God declares to be "good". I'm going to create a new word, "cluppydup", and "cluppdydup" is whatever I says is cluppydup, Q.E.D. - that communicates no information, and if I say I'm going to enact punishment upon you for doing anything that is not cluppydup, then while I am now communicating something, it has nothing to do with the essence of the thing signified by "cluppydup". Add to that the fact that if God has absolutely and positively predetermined as efficient cause every act of every human being, these same being automata unable to even be efficient causes of anything due to their lack of free agency, nothing can truly be contrary to God's will, and nothing can be "offensive" (another undefined word) to God.

Calvin tends more than Luther to follow ideas through to their logical conclusion but that leads time and again to a reductio ad absurdum, and as a result Calvinism is one of the least logically consistent ideologies I can think of. The worst thing I can imagine is for a thinker as shallow and as superifically analytical as a lawyer to construct a system of metaphysics and build a theology on top of it.

[ermy_law]

Good is defined as what God declares to be good. Things are not inherently good in themselves: all goodness derives its goodness from God.

I'm a lawyer, so I can understand and appreciate the desire to systematize theology in the way that Calvin did. He was reacting against Pelagian and semi-Pelagian tendencies in Catholicism since he thought such tendencies necessarily limited God's majesty. As we are currently bearing witness to the full flowering those latent Pelagian tendencies that have gone unchecked, perhaps he was on to something.

But that is not the subject of this thread. The refutation to the idea that all sin is equal can be, as others have suggested, biblical or logical. For me, the best refutation is challenging the idea that our sin somehow changes anything about God. Since it does not and cannot, our sins singularly affect our particular side of our relationship with God. It is common experience that some of our sins wound that relationship in a qualitatively different manner than others.