Dave Hunt — The Popular Question¶

Every movement needs someone who writes for the person in the pew. Dave Hunt did that for this argument, and did it so effectively that a generation of pastors had to answer questions they had never been asked before.

Who they are¶

Hunt was an evangelical author and co-founder of The Berean Call, a ministry known for its discernment literature; he wrote The Seduction of Christianity with T. A. McMahon in 1985. What Love Is This? Calvinism's Misrepresentation of God (2002) is a long, plain-spoken, chapter-by-chapter argument aimed at lay readers, and it sold widely enough to make Calvinism a topic in churches that had never discussed it.

Their best arguments¶

1. John 3:16 and the meaning of "world"¶

The heart of the book is the simplest text in the Bible: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish." Hunt's question is what "world" can possibly mean if God has already decided to save only some. The Calvinist answer — that "world" means the elect, or "all kinds of people" — requires the reader to hear a restriction that the sentence does not contain, and it makes "whoever believes" a strange way to describe people who cannot but believe. He presses the same question across the "whosoever" texts and the universal-love passages. See John 6:44 for how the casebook handles the strongest counter-text.

2. The gospel offer must be true when it is spoken¶

Hunt's second argument is the one that reached pastors. If Christ did not die for a person, then telling that person "Christ died for you" is false. If the preacher does not know who the elect are, he does not know whether his message is true for anyone in the room. Hunt argues that this makes the Calvinist gospel unpreachable as good news, and that the practical evasions — "offer it to all, but mean it only for the elect" — are exactly the sort of qualification the New Testament never makes.

3. A different God, not just a different doctrine¶

The book's title is its thesis: the dispute is not about the mechanics of salvation but about God's character. Hunt argues that a God who decrees the fall and then decrees most of humanity to remain in it is not the Father of Jesus Christ, however orthodox the surrounding theology. He also presses the pastoral fruit: fear, assurance problems, and a tendency to treat people as either elect or not. That last point is where the book is most useful and most dangerous.

One representative work¶

What Love Is This? (2002). Start with the John 3:16 chapter, then the chapters on the offer of the gospel; the historical chapters are the weakest part and should be skipped or checked against better sources.

Their distinctive contribution¶

Accessibility, and courage about the stakes. Hunt refused the polite fiction that this is a debate between equally good options about which we can agree to disagree; he said plainly that the character of God is at issue. He also gave ordinary Christians a vocabulary — the offer, the "whosoever," the love of God — that they could use in a conversation without a seminary degree.

Where the case is weakest¶

Hunt's rhetoric is often excessive: he describes Calvinism as a different gospel and its God as not the God of the Bible, which goes beyond argument into accusation, and it is exactly the register this casebook's editorial standards forbid. His historical claims are unreliable in places — the material on Augustine and on Calvin's Geneva repeats popular Protestant polemic rather than engaging the sources — and he does not reckon with the best Reformed exegesis of Romans 9 or John 6. He sometimes argues by outrage rather than by inference, and a reader who accepts his tone will be unprepared for a careful Calvinist. Use his questions, not his conclusions and never his tone.

What to borrow¶

The John 3:16 question, the "what can the preacher actually say?" test, the insistence that God's character is the real issue, and the plain style. Then take those questions to the exegetical files, where they can be answered with reasons rather than indignation.