For years, every time Vox has gone on one of his anti-Calvinist or anti-Piper sprees, I have thought that it would be very enlightening if he were to allow himself to be questioned about his theology (in contrast to just reacting negatively to another theology.)

To help illustrate my motivation, I’ll go back to Monty Python and its ‘Crunchy Frog’ skit.

Bear with me and let me share a part of that skit with you.  To explain the setting, “Mr.Praline” is an inspector from the ‘Hygiene Squad’ and Mr. Milton is the “Sole Proprietor and Owner of the Whizzo Chocolate Company”. They are talking about some of the candy sold by this company.

====

Praline Next we have number four, ‘Crunchy Frog’.

Milton   Yes.

Praline Am I right in thinking there’s a real frog in here?

Milton   Yes. A little one.

Praline What sort of frog?

Milton   A dead frog.

Praline Is it cooked?

Milton   No.

Praline What, a raw frog?

Milton   We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.

Praline That’s as may be, but it’s still a frog!

Milton   What else?

Praline Well don’t you even take the bones out?

Milton   If we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy would it?

Praline Well, the Superintendent thought it was an almond whirl. People won’t expect there to be a frog in there. They’re bound to think it’s some sort of mock frog.

Milton   (insulted) Mock frog? We use no artificial preservatives or additives of any kind!

Praline Nevertheless, I must warn you that in future you should delete the words ‘crunchy frog’, and replace them with the legend, ‘crunchy raw unboned real dead frog’ if you want to avoid prosecution.

==

It is my thought that Vox has long been passing off his theology as a Crunchy Frog theology, when in actuality it is Crunchy Raw Unboned Real Dead Frog theology, at least in the eyes of most people when they actually see it. Which many hadn’t because Vox was only focused on Calvinism.

So when Vox accepted MarkkuKopenan’s challenge to respond to answer five questions, it was my hope that the oddness of his theology would be made clear. And here’s the good news: It was made clear.

====

So let’s go through the five questions, shall we?

Question 1: A Summary of What Vox Day Believes

Vox was gracious here in answering the question, because (A) It wasn’t a question about a Bible passage which many assumed all the questions would be and (B) it wasn’t really a question, it was a statement that said “Edit this.” But Vox did edit the paragraph, changing surprisingly few words.

When I wrote the question, I made a guess as to what he believed. And I tried to choose the portions of his belief that made his theology unique. It was after his response to Question 1 that I decided that I should start compiling a list of his unique beliefs, so that they would be in one concise spot.

This turned out to be a good idea.

Some were disappointed (or saw it as a weakness of our case) that we didn’t force Vox to give Bible references to support his answer, but that wasn’t the goal of that question.

Question 2:  Vox explains why your hairs most likely aren’t numbered.

It was in this post that I saw that things were going well, given my goals. Vox chose to say that the context of the “God Knows when a Sparrow dies” passage and the “Your hairs are numbered” passage should be understood only in the context of the Sending of the Twelve and were thus only meant to apply to the 12 Disciples.

When I pointed out that in Luke the Sparrows and Hairs passage are 3 chapters away from the Sending of the Twelve, he said that the book of Luke was based on Matthew and we thus can disregard the context in Luke. He shows his Bible Is Not Innerrant bent here, but it’s worse than that. He doesn’t even give Luke the benefit of the doubt that he would give a regular secular book that had compiled words from another source.

I’ll just note that it was in the comments of this question that Nate called me “sugar britches”, which is by far the nicest thing he’s ever called me.

Question 3: Vox Embraces An Interesting Theology and Says X = Not Xn

In this response, Vox stated that “it is incorrect to describe me as a Arminian since my theological stance is more accurately described as Pelagian”.

I will tell you this. If Vox stating that he was a Pelagianist was the only thing that came out of all of these questions, it would have been worth it. Today I googled “Pelagianism Boyd” and found this statement: “Grace helps people live for God, but Pelagians deny that people are saved by grace alone. For this reason, evangelicals are in agreement that Pelagianism is an unbiblical belief system.” This is from the glossary of “Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology” a book where Greg Boyd is one of two authors.

So when I saw that statement from Vox, I thought that that was all I needed from that question. But then I looked at his Chain of Events and saw these two statements:

(A)   The Father draws everyone.

(B)    Some . . .  do not permit themselves to be drawn.

Later he agreed to the statement “Some who God draws are not drawn.”

This, I maintain, is a contortion at least as bad as what he claims the Calvinists make.

Question 4:  Vox states that his God unintentionally causes bad things to happen to people.

I just want to point out that Vox, who is very outspoken about his beliefs that the US Government often makes laws with good intentions but that have unintended negative consequences, has a God that does similar things.

Question 5: Vox says that Hate is most likely Hyperbolic. Calvinists agree.

Here I’ll quote MarkkuKoponen’s comment:

That was the whole point of this exercise. It started from my comment to Vox in Skype; It is nearly always Vox who is on the attack, so he gets to choose the verses. Of course he is going to choose the verses where the plain reading is in line with his own view. And therefore it looks as if we need to give seemingly odd explanations for any verse.

So, we changed places for a while, so that we’d put out verses where Vox has to go looking elsewhere in order to prove that the plain reading is not the correct one.

Indeed.

===

Summarizing my summary, I will say that during this process, the personal emails that I got stating that they’ve now seen that Vox is wrong, the comments on my blog posts encouraging me, or making suggestions of items to put on the list of what he believes, and every comment on Vox’s posts that began with something like , “I’m not a Calvinist, but Vox you’re wrong when you say . . . ” has encouraged me that some truth is getting out.

Now, I have prayed that those who are wrong (and I’m not saying this isn’t me) about the nature of God will see where they are wrong. I want God to be glorified and I believe that whatever is true about him will glorify him. So I will still pray that we will all understand what God does and doesn’t do.