Is the God Calvinists believe in unjust? Who I am: ex worship leader / lifelong "Christian" of 18 years, now agnostic.
Why I ask: If God is the way I am about to describe (unjust from a human perspective), why follow him?


From my understanding, the belief that God has predetermined those who will receive salvation is one held by many Christians, and in my experience has been mostly Christians with a Calvinist theological perspective. 

This is what I mean by predestination: The belief that God has chosen/ predetermined those who will spend eternity in heaven with him and while not choosing others. In doing so, he has intentionally NOT chosen some to spend eternity with him.

Here is the problem. According to the Calvinists I have talked to, because of our sinful human nature that we've had since the fall, we are not deserving of heaven/ God's presence.  For example, if a child is born and dies the following day, its spirit will go to hell due to its sinful nature. Another example would be a person who has never accepted the gospel because they never heard it. Even if they have heard it, certainly no two people have had an equal chance to receive salvation (i.e. a pastor's son and a child raised in an atheist home). This is not even taking into account whether or not God has chosen them for heaven. 

In no way are these things just from a human perspective. However, if this is the case, then there are both uninformed adult and newborn souls in hell who never had a fair opportunity to receive salvation (by a human standard). Why would anyone desire to be in the presence of a God who does not show mercy to certain people? It seems to me as though it would only be to escape the punishment of hell.

Please correct my misconceptions of this viewpoint or explain it is that God is just in this context.
I think the issue here is that you are trying to examine one point of doctrine outside of the context of the whole system of doctrines that it fits into. If you take the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination by itself and tack it on to a generic pseudo-protestant view of salvation, you'll end up with a problem such as the one you describe. God becomes unjust because your definition of justice is supported by a theological framework that Calvinistic theology would say is a broken framework. Even as a Calvinist I can see how people who try to examine a specific doctrine such as predestination can conclude it to be nonsensical or even offensive. However that is not the end of the story.

In order to judge such a doctrine, you must consider it in the context of all the same presuppositions and other related doctrines. This will be a very simplistic outline of some issues that need to be brought into the discussion rather than a full treaties on the issues, but I hope it helps provide a starting point.

First of all, predestination cannot be considered without also resolving the issue of original sin. According to a Calvinistic interpretation of scripture, the idea of original sin when traced through all of scripture paints a picture of man as totally depraved: in other words he will not (and cannot) on his own volition and power act or choose anything that is truly good in God's eyes. It's a hard pill to swallow because man's prideful nature always wants to defend himself to the last; yet I have come to believe this is both the true nature of all men and exactly the picture Scripture paints of him.

This leaves us with an unsettling conclusion quite different from the one you pose in your question. If the doctrine of total depravity is to be believed, no man on earth would ever, given an opportunity, voluntarily choose to follow God or believe in Christ as savior. The only just thing for God to do with such rebellious prideful people is to destroy them.

This creates a whole new problem. Suddenly God is not unjust for not saving some, he is unjust for saving any at all! The problem with justice, for a Calvinist, comes at the point of "unconditional election", whereby God opts to save some in spite of the fact that they have fulfilled no condition for deserving salvation such as believing or doing works or whatever. Now the Doctrines of Grace are starting to all play off of each other!

The problem of injustice -- that God would knowingly justify (make right) and acquit somebody who themselves had done nothing but wrong and of whom justice would demand punishment -- is resolved in the propitiatory act of Christ where somebody who had done no wrong and justly deserved life was "made sin" and put in our law place and punished on our behalf. Whose law place did he step into? Again according to the same set of interpretations one must understand Limited Atonement, or the idea that Christ choose to be the atonement for a specific set of people, his chosen. In a very real sense this choice is arbitrary because those people did not do anything specific to deserve it -- hence we cannot boast in any choice or act of our own but only in Christ who rescued us -- but it is not unjust for him not to choose other than he did. The alternative is that he died in an attempt to save more, but was ineffective in so much as it only "worked" for some people who had enough good sense to recognize the value of his work of their own accord (an idea ruled out earlier by Total Depravity).

The system can be rounded out with the other doctrines such as Irresistible Grace where God does not fail to lead those he has acquitted to repentance faith and repentance and holy lives being transformed to be like Christ; and Perseverance of the Saints whereby those he has saved and truly worked in cannot be pulled out of his hand by any force of Satan or shortcoming of their own.

Obviously these points need to be examined in the light of the Scriptures. They basically stand or fall together. If the Bible as God's inerrant word really is pointing in the direction of any of these points, it must also be consistent to tell us about the others. Great care must be taken in two areas:


Not to use some system that fails to take into account all the points in Scripture to interpret for us whether some doctrine is true or not. Predestination makes little sense to some theological systems, but it must not be thrown out because it doesn't fit a definition of justice that isn't the one defined by Scripture. This is the error I think you have made.
Not to read into Scripture some point not actually found in the text because it has to fit our system. Quite frankly this is the error Calvinists are more likely to fall into. If the interpretive framework fails to shed light on the whole of Scripture or is contradicted by it on any point, one must start over and examine it's presuppositions.


I am convinced that the only set of presuppositions and interpretive methods that leads to a framework that can consistently interpret the whole of Scripture is the one that leads to all of these Doctrine of Grace -- yet it is not a perfect system and we must remain humble in the knowledge that our limited understandings of God's works are always going to be flawed in so far as we have not yet been made perfect in glory!

Lastly I think it's worth noting that it is impossible to approach Scripture without some interpretive framework. There is no such thing as entirely unbiased reading. Even if the text in question was written in your own time and language, words are meaningless with out certain presuppositions. For example if you fail to presuppose that I wrote this post in English and rather assume it to be Bengali, it will be no more than gibberish. In testing it can be shown that reading the text using English grammar and vocabulary lead to a much more useful understanding. Likewise if we do not approach Scripture with certain assumptions about how it was inspired or is meant to be interpreted as a whole, we will not come away with as deep or true an understanding of it. While these are pre-suppositions (pre because they must be made first and tested later) they can be shown to make more sense when taken together as a whole.