Roger Olson, Calvinism and Vincent Cheung

It is not difficult to find Calvinists on the Internet (e.g., bloggers) who boldly state that Calvinism requires confession that God is the author of sin and evil. One such person is Vincent Cheung, who writes about Calvinist as a Calvinist ... Like many others one can easily find on the web, Cheung ridicules fellow Calvinists who say that God is not the author of sin . He then says that "when someone alleges that my view of divine sovereignty makes God the author of sin, my first reaction tends to be 'So what?' .. there is no biblical or rational problem with him being the author of sin." Cheung goes on to argue that the typical Calvinist account of God's absolute sovereignty necessarily leads to God as being the author of sin in any ordinary sense of "author."

— Roger Olson, Against Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), p. 59

I would like here to comment on one part of Olson's book which I did not cover in my review, because it deals with a proclaimed Calvinist and Internet figure Vincent Cheung.

As it can be seen, Olson is using Cheung as a case study to prop up his attack on Calvinism. The sad thing is that Cheung with his language is a ripe target for attack. Cheung in his publication The Author of Sin claims that the word "author" merely refers to someone who ultimately controls the action of sinning. This is supposed to be the normal definition of "author." But is this really the case? Olson of course couldn't really care less what the definition of "author" is, as long as he can taint Calvinism with evil. But what does Olson desire his readers to think? Olson wants his readers to think that in Calvinism, God directly creates sin and make people sin. If God is sovereign in the sense of controlling everything, then God must make people sin, which is intolerable and make God a "moral monster."

The problem with Vincent Cheung is that his provocative tone and language is stumbling people more than it helps to add light to the subject. By refusing to emphasize the distinction (if he even thinks it is important) between primary and secondary causation, his views tend towards making God responsible for the action of sinning itself. Merely claiming that whatever God does is good by definition does not solve the problem for such is a triumph of extreme Nominalism. Such an argument can be used but it cannot be used alone, for God does not work in a manner contrary to His attributes and therefore a more biblical argument must be given.

I realize of course that Olson will try to find any wacky person on the Internet if doing so would aid him in his emotional argument against Calvinism, and there are many such people including hyper-Calvinists of all stripes on the Internet, not necessarily Vincent Cheung. That said, many hyper-Calvinists are much easier to spot as they embrace such nonsense as Eternal Justification which is so far removed from the truths of Scripture that it only makes sense when one embraced that type of Rationalistic system. Cheung's bombastic rhetoric makes it harder for people to see his Rationalism as being distinct from the rational reasoning of confessional Calvinism, and makes it easy for Olson to either drive people away from Calvinism, or towards his version of it , both of which are not desirable.