On Nov. 20, a preacher in Tulsa, Okla., Billy Joe Daugherty, was smacked in the face by a visitor during a Sunday morning altar call, leaving the 53-year-old pastor with a bloody gash above his eye that required two stitches.

The sermon had been videotaped by the church and footage of the assault was later broadcast on cable news, including on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. David Letterman even joked about the incident on his Late Show.

As of last week, more than 2.6 million people had logged into the website of a Tulsa TV station to see the punch, delivered by a 50-year-old man with a history of violent assaults who offered no apology when Daugherty visited him at the Tulsa Jail.

In an Associated Press wire story, Daugherty said that in his sermon just before the attack happened, he "had just told the (biblical) story of Paul and Silas being beaten and thrown into jail—(how) they were mistreated, but they praised God. I was talking about living a lifestyle of praise, through every situation. This (attack) was like an illustrated sermon."

According to a column in the e-newsletter Charisma Online, "Daugherty says God allowed the incident so more people could hear about Jesus, who suffered beatings, torture, humiliation and public execution yet still loved His enemies."

To me, this sounds exactly like the kind of superstitious Calvinist-oriented predestination mumbo-jumbo that has riddled our country for centuries and maintains a vast foothold in Christian worship and study.

In essence, Calvinism teaches that God's behind everything that happens because He's pre-arranged all of what goes on, including predetermining the details of a person's life. Under this false theology, God is also said to pick who He will save for eternal life and who He will send to hell. Individuals have no say in the matter.

Unbelievably, the Calvinist notion of "total depravity," as its labeled by adherents, says it's impossible for an unsaved man to believe the gospel when he hears it! In other words, the man can't believe, but then God condemns him because he doesn't believe.

It's crazy stuff and yet look at some of the big, big names in Christian history who bought into this pure pagan heresy: Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, John Eliot, Karl Barth, Jonathan Edwards, Blaise Pascal, Noah Webster, William Carey, John Bunyan, John Knox, Lyman Beecher and Francis Schaeffer.

"Largely forgotten today, George Whitefield was probably the most religious figure of the 18^th century," writes the editors of Christian History magazine in their 2000 book, "131 Christians Everyone Should Know." "Before his tours of the colonies were complete, virtually every man, woman, and child had heard of the 'Great Itinerant' at least once. So pervasive was Whitefield's impact in America that he can justly be styled America's first cultural hero. Indeed, before Whitefield, it is doubtful any name, other than royalty, was known equally from Boston to Charleston."

As for evangelist Charles Spurgeon, the book says of his fame, "No chapel seemed large enough to hold those who wanted to hear the 'preaching sensation of London.' He preached to tens of thousands in London's greatest halls—Exeter, Surry Gardens, Agricultural. . . His sermons were published in the Monday edition of the London Times, and even the New York Times."

Calvinism gets its name and theology from John Calvin, a 16^th century scholar from France who, upon studying law as a young student at the University of Orleans, dipped into Renaissance humanism and studied Plato and Aristotle.

Originally a Catholic, Calvin derived his doctrines from the teachings of Augustine, the Roman Catholic theologian from the 4th century who, at an early age, fell under the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy and was a major early proponent of studying the Bible allegorically rather than literally.

Not only is Calvin regarded as a leading figure in Puritanism but, "his ideas have been blamed for or credited with (depending on your view) the rise of capitalism, individualism and democracy," says the Christian History book.

"Most of American culture has been so influenced by Calvinism that there's much about Calvinism engrained into people's thinking and philosophies of life that they don't even know where it came from," says my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.) in a study I have on tape. "The old idea of 'manifest destiny' and the 'rugged individualist' comes right out of that pit. It's nothing but pagan nonsense."

At its base, Calvinism contradicts not only the Word of God but God's intrinsic nature as a loving Father whose desire is for all men be His children, accepting His gift of eternal life to be with Him in heaven forever.

Of course, even Calvin himself contradicts himself in his different written commentaries.

In one commentary, he states, "As Scripture then clearly shows, we say that God once established by His eternal and unchangeable plan, those whom He long before determined once for all to receive into salvation and those who, on the other hand, He would devote to destruction. . . By His just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment, He has barred the door of life to those He's given over to damnation."

Then in another commentary, regarding I Tim. 2:4, he writes, "Paul demonstrates that God has at heart the salvation of all because He invites all to the acknowledgment of the truth."

In his commentary on the famous verse John 3:16 ("For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"), Calvin assures, "Such is also the import of the term 'world, which He formally used. For though nothing would be found in the world that is worthy of the favor of God, yet He shows Himself to be reconciled to the world when He invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else than entrance into life."

You just wonder how in the world the guy can say such opposite things and not get that he's changing his story. The worst part of it is he makes a liar out of God.

As my pastor has explained more than once, theologians love to extrapolate and extrapolate; and premise and premise and premise; and use their logic and extend everything out. The result is they deduce from the plain words in the Bible all sorts of hare-brained ideas constructed from their own faulty logic and philosophy. They arrive at their conclusions by totally and completely ignoring dispensational truth along with the Word of God in general.

Take Calvin's business about God choosing some people for salvation and others for damnation. He arrives at this from the twisting what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:28-30, which reads:

"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

In the passage, the word "foreknow" comes from the Greek word "progonosco" (pro is before and gonosco means "to know something").

"It means to know it, to recognize something in advance," explains Jordan in a taped study on Calvinism. "It's exactly what our word 'foreknowledge' means. But Calvinists change that meaning and say it means 'to forelove something'—you love it beforehand. Foreknowledge does not mean foreloved or foreordained. It doesn't mean God determined ahead of time what was going to happen; that's he's predetermined everything that happens on this planet at every given moment."

The word "know," or gonosco, is often used in Scripture in the sense of "intimate acquaintance." In fact, in passages like Matthew 1:25, where it explains that Mary didn't 'know' Joseph, it's talking about the fact the couple didn't have sexual relations until after Christ was born.

In Matthew 7:23, when Jesus Christ says, "I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity," He's not saying He doesn't have knowledge of a person, precisely because God knows everyone on the earth. What He's saying is He doesn't have regard for the person.

The word "foreknow" and the word "know" are not the same word in the Bible, as Calvinists wrongly conclude.

Bottom line, God's purpose is never that somebody sin and by stating that God predetermined for you or me to sin is to make God the author of sin.

That's why the Westminster Confession of the mid-1600s, produced by English-speaking Presbyterians and given official status in England, makes absolutely no sense.

The confession, referred to as a "theological consensus of international Calvinism" in Merriam Webster's "Encyclopedia of World Religions," states that "some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death," and yet "neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of creatures."

God makes it abundantly clear throughout His Book that all humans have been given the free will to either choose to rely on His Word by faith, thereby gaining eternal life, or to reject Him and voluntarily accept the potential consequences of denying His love and grace.

"Calvinists constantly double-talk to deceive people away from using common sense," sums up a preacher from Tennessee that I sometimes listen to over the internet service Paltalk.com. "They insist that free will makes man the cause of his own salvation but then it's not of your own free will to choose or reject the gospel. That statement doesn't even make sense.

"They teach that a sinner is of himself neither capable nor willing to believe the gospel and therefore 'the elect' are so influenced by divine power that their will is overcome and changed by the 'saving irresistible grace of God.' It's all hogwash!"