A Response to Dave Hunt — What Love Is This, Really?

Why this book, why this response

Dave Hunt (1926–2013) was a prolific prophecy writer and popular-level apologist whose ministry, The Berean Call, reached millions. When he turned his pen against Reformed theology in What Love Is This? (first edition 2002, revised 2004, and expanded in 2006), he produced the most widely read anti-Calvinist book of the last half-century. It is not an academic book. It does not engage with John Owen, Francis Turretin, Herman Bavinck, Louis Berkhof, or any serious Reformed systematic theologian. It is not trying to. It is a popular polemic written to reach the person in the pew who has never read a word of Reformed theology but has heard the rumor that Calvinism makes God a monster. For that reader, Hunt's book was for many years the entry-level weapon.

The standard Reformed response to Hunt has been silence or dismissal. James White wrote one of the few full-length replies, Debating Calvinism, with Hunt himself — and in debate Hunt did not perform well, which only confirmed the Reformed instinct that he was not worth engaging. That instinct is wrong. Hunt's book lives on in thousands of church libraries, handed to anyone who starts "going Reformed," and the book's simple arguments are still being recited on Christian radio and in Sunday school classes a quarter century later. If the elect happen to encounter Hunt's arguments before they encounter a patient answer, the answer needs to exist. This page is that answer.

We will treat Hunt with the dignity he himself did not always extend to his opponents. He is with the Lord now. The man we are answering is no longer here to defend himself, which means the case has to be made with even more care, not less. Our goal is not to score against a dead brother. Our goal is to help the living reader — the one who has the book in hand or whose grandmother pressed it on them last Thanksgiving — see where the arguments go wrong.

Move 1 — The question itself is a gift

Hunt's title is a borrowed line from the old hymn — What Love Is This, Charitie Bancroft's meditation on the cross. In Hunt's mouth it becomes an accusation. In ours it becomes a doorway. Because the question what love is this is exactly the question Paul forces us to ask in Romans 9, and Paul refuses to duck it.

Hunt assumes the question is rhetorical — of course this is not love, the whole Calvinist system stands convicted by the word itself. But Paul treats the question as real. He faces it directly: "Is God unjust? Not at all!" (Romans 9:14). He does not soften the doctrine that provoked the charge. He does not say, well, I did not really mean Jacob and Esau the individuals. He says, God will have mercy on whom He has mercy, and He will have compassion on whom He has compassion (v. 15). And then he adds the line that would have sunk any modern bestseller: "Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and He hardens whom He wants to harden" (v. 18).

If the Reformed system is a slander against divine love, Paul is the first slanderer. Hunt writes as though Paul's argument in Romans 9 can be set aside by rhetorical volume. But every charge Hunt levels against Reformed theology is a charge Paul anticipated and refused to grant. The imaginary Arminian objector of Romans 9:19 — "Why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?" — is the objector Hunt's entire book champions. Paul does not answer him the way Hunt wants to be answered. He answers him by saying: "Who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'" (v. 20). The full verse-by-verse walk through Romans 9 is where this chapter stops being a Reformed proof-text and starts being the chapter Arminianism cannot survive.

So when we ask with Hunt, what love is this?, we are not going to back away from the question. We are going to answer it. But the answer is not the one Hunt assumed.

Move 2 — The ad hominem against Calvin is a category error

A significant portion of What Love Is This? is spent indicting John Calvin personally — his treatment of Michael Servetus, his role in the government of Geneva, his perceived harshness, his alleged papal sympathies. Hunt's logic is transparent: if Calvin is morally monstrous, his theology can be safely dismissed without engaging the text. This is the oldest rhetorical trick in the book, and Scripture explicitly forbids it. Paul never says, do not listen to false teachers because of who they are; he says, do not listen to false teachers because of what they say about the gospel (Galatians 1:8). Truth is not indexed to the virtue of the messenger.

But beyond the category error, the charges themselves are historically distorted. Servetus was condemned to death not by Calvin but by the Geneva city council under 16th-century civil law that criminalized heresy across all of Europe, Protestant and Catholic alike. Servetus had already been condemned in absentia by the Catholic Inquisition in Vienne and had escaped to Geneva knowing full well what awaited heretics there. Calvin was not a magistrate; he did not hold civil office; he could not have condemned or executed anyone. What Calvin actually did was petition for Servetus to be executed by the more merciful method of beheading rather than by burning. He was overruled. Judging Calvin by the execution of Servetus is like judging the Apostle Paul by the stoning of heretics in the Old Testament — the frame is wrong, the law is wrong, the office is wrong, and the inferences Hunt draws do not follow.

Geneva under Calvin was strict. Hunt calls it a theocracy. It was, by modern standards, oppressive — and by the standards of its own 16th-century neighbors, actually among the more humane cities in Europe. It took in Protestant refugees by the thousand when every other city turned them away. Knox called it "the most perfect school of Christ" not because it was a paradise but because the preaching of the Word was uncompromised there. These are the historical facts. Readers who want the full picture will find our historical timeline more useful than Hunt's selective citation.

Even granting every negative thing Hunt said about Calvin — which we do not — the doctrines of grace are not Calvin's doctrines. Paul preached them. Augustine defended them against Pelagius a millennium before Calvin was born. The debate between Augustine and Pelagius was the crucible in which the early church ruled, decisively and catholicly (small-c), that salvation is monergistic — at the Second Council of Orange in 529 A.D., centuries before any Protestant-Catholic division existed. To dismiss the doctrines because of Calvin is to pretend that history started in 1536.

Move 3 — "Not biblical, just Augustinian" misreads church history

Hunt's second move is a sleight of hand that lands with tremendous force on Protestant readers: these doctrines are not really biblical at all, he argues; they are medieval Catholic innovations smuggled into Protestantism by a man who never fully escaped Rome. The implicit argument is that the real early church, the pre-Augustinian church, held something like Arminianism, and that Augustine and then Calvin corrupted pure apostolic teaching.

This claim collapses on contact with the actual historical record. The pre-Augustinian Fathers were not Arminian. They did not teach libertarian free will in the modern sense. They did not have a developed systematic soteriology at all, because the controversy that forced such a system into articulation had not yet happened. What they did teach — the sovereignty of grace, the necessity of the new birth, the bondage of the will to sin apart from grace, the particularity of God's electing love — reads considerably closer to Augustine than to Pelagius. The fifth-century debate did not invent the doctrines of grace; it clarified them under pressure. The pressure revealed what the church had always believed, now forced to speak it in precise propositions because Pelagius had introduced an alternative.

The Second Council of Orange in 529 A.D. ruled against Pelagius and against the more moderate semi-Pelagian compromise — the very compromise that modern Arminianism most resembles. Orange taught, in binding conciliar language, that the beginning of faith and the very desire to believe are themselves gifts of prevenient grace, not works originating in the unaided human will. Orange was not a Protestant document. It was not a Calvinist document. It was the whole Western church, five centuries before the Great Schism and a millennium before the Reformation, confessing in the language of the text of Scripture what Hunt says is a later Catholic invention.

What Hunt has done, rhetorically, is exploit the Protestant reader's suspicion of Catholicism by labeling the doctrines of grace "Catholic." It works as long as the reader does not know church history. Once the reader does know — once they realize that Pelagianism, not Augustinianism, is what the early church condemned as heresy — the entire "guilt by Catholic association" tactic evaporates. The Synod of Dort, where the five points were finally codified against the five articles of the Remonstrance, was not inventing doctrine. It was doing for post-Reformation Protestantism what Orange had done for the early Western church: speaking precisely the ancient faith in the teeth of a new articulation of the old error.

Hunt's framing pretends that rejecting Augustine returns you to the pristine early church. The truth is that rejecting Augustine puts you in the company Pelagius kept, which is the company the early church excommunicated.

Move 4 — The title question, answered

Now we come to the heart of Hunt's book. What love is this? If God is free to save or not save whom He pleases, and if some are passed over who might otherwise have been saved, then — Hunt argues — the word love has been evacuated of meaning. A God who does not love every human being equally and savingly is not the God of the Bible. The whole book is an amplification of this one charge.

The charge collapses the moment we refuse its hidden premise. Hunt assumes, without argument, that divine love must be uniform — that God cannot love one person with a love He does not extend identically to every other person, or else the word love fails. But Scripture nowhere makes this assumption. The Bible speaks of at least three distinct senses in which God loves.

There is the love of benevolence — the common love God shows to every creature in preservation, in rain on the righteous and the wicked (Matthew 5:45), in delay of judgment, in the kindness that Romans 2:4 says is meant to lead to repentance. Every human being is a recipient of this love every day of their life. The Reformed tradition does not deny it. It insists on it.

There is the love of compassion — the pathos with which God declares His unwillingness that the wicked should perish and His grief over their rebellion. "Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?" He says through Ezekiel 33:11, "Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?" This love is universal in the sense that God's heart does not rejoice in any person's damnation, ever. The reprobate are not hated gratuitously; they are judged according to their works, with God's moral recoil rather than His delight.

And there is the love of election — the particular, setting-apart love by which God chose a people for Himself before the foundation of the world, "in accordance with his pleasure and will" (Ephesians 1:5). This is the love Paul describes as "the great love with which he loved us" (Ephesians 2:4) — great precisely because it was us, not everyone, who received it in this particular mode. This is the love by which Christ laid down His life for the sheep (John 10:11, 15) — not for the goats, not for the wolves, but for the sheep. If the love of election were identical to the love of benevolence, Paul's language in Ephesians 2 would be impossible. Something was shown to us that was not shown equally to every human who ever lived. Call it what you will — electing love is the biblical term.

So when Hunt asks, what love is this?, the answer is: this is the love of election, which is one of three biblical loves, which does not negate the other two, and which no reader of Paul can plausibly deny without also denying Ephesians 1, Romans 9, John 6, John 10, John 17, and half the Psalter. God loves Jacob in a way He does not love Esau (Romans 9:13). This is not a contradiction of divine love. It is the clarification of what divine love most gloriously is. And it is the love that saved you, if you are saved — because if God had waited for you to be lovable enough to merit the love of election, you would still be waiting.

Hunt's instinct that "love" is the central word of the Bible is correct. His instinct that the Reformed system threatens the word is wrong. Reformed theology is the only system that preserves the full biblical vocabulary of divine love — benevolent toward all, compassionate in His pleadings, electing in its decisive and eternal action. Synergism has to flatten the three into one and then argue that the flattened meaning is the only meaning, at which point Ephesians 2:4 no longer means what Paul meant by it. The love objection in full, and the fairness objection that usually rides with it, are answered throughout this site.

Move 5 — Pasted verses, missing exegesis

Large portions of What Love Is This? consist of strings of biblical quotations assembled to refute Calvinism. The method is identical on every page: quote a verse containing all, world, whosoever, or not willing; assert that the word means what it would mean in a modern English dictionary; move on. Exegesis — the disciplined determination of what the author meant in the context he wrote — is almost entirely absent. The Greek is not consulted. The context is not weighed. The possibility that all or world or whosoever might have a more nuanced range in biblical usage than in modern colloquial English is never entertained.

This is the entire book's method in a sentence: if a verse sounds Arminian in the King James rendered in a 21st-century American ear, the case is closed. The refutation of this method is just as simple in principle — read the verses in context — but considerably more time-consuming in practice, which is why an entire section of this site exists to work through the proof-texts Hunt leans on one by one.

Hunt will cite "For God so loved the world" (John 3:16) as a death blow to limited atonement. We have walked through John 3:16 in its actual context: Nicodemus the Pharisee, the serpent in the wilderness of Numbers 21 (which did not heal everyone bitten — only those who looked in faith, which the Lord Himself reveals is given not to all), and the range of kosmos in Johannine usage, which is almost never "every individual human being who has ever lived or will live."

Hunt will cite "not willing that any should perish" (2 Peter 3:9) and assume the "any" is every human being. We have walked through 2 Peter 3:9 showing that the audience Peter explicitly addresses in verse 8 is "you, beloved" — his Christian readers — and the "any" is the elect yet to be brought in before the Lord returns, which is precisely why He waits.

Hunt will cite "who wills all men to be saved" (1 Timothy 2:4) and assume the "all" is every individual. We have walked through 1 Timothy 2:4 showing that the immediate context (verses 1-2: "kings and all those in authority") makes "all" a category of kinds — not every individual — which is exactly how pas functions all over Paul.

Hunt will cite "propitiation for the whole world" (1 John 2:2) and assume Christ atoned for every person universally. We have walked through 1 John 2:2 in the context of 1 John 2:19 ("they went out from us because they never were of us"), showing that John's "whole world" stands in contrast not to "only the elect" but to "only Jewish believers" — the whole world being the Gentile expansion, not every individual.

And the two large pages at the root of the problem — a lexical study of every "all" in the New Testament and every "world" in the New Testament — demonstrate what a responsible reading of these words requires, with dozens of examples. Hunt's method, in a word, requires the reader not to know Greek. Once the reader knows a little Greek, the method collapses.

Move 6 — Hunt's hidden Christology problem

Now we reach the crown jewel of this response, the point at which Hunt's entire framework discovers that it cannot account for Jesus.

Hunt's operating axiom is this: genuine love is impossible without libertarian freedom. If God causes or determines a person's love, that love is not real. It must be able-to-be-otherwise, or it is mechanical, not loving. This axiom drives the whole book. It is why Hunt thinks irresistible grace turns God into a rapist. It is why he thinks total depravity destroys human responsibility. It is why he cannot bear the idea that God ordains the salvation of the elect.

Now apply that axiom to the incarnate Son of God.

Jesus Christ, according to orthodox Chalcedonian confession, had a fully human will alongside His divine will. That human will was perfectly free — and it was incapable of sinning. Christ's humanity did not have the live option of sinning. It was non posse peccare — "not able to sin" — from conception through crucifixion. If Hunt's axiom is correct, Christ's love for the Father was not real love, because Christ could not have loved otherwise. If freedom requires the live option to sin, Christ's perfect obedience was robotic, not free. The theology at the center of the Christian faith collapses.

The same problem hits heaven. Glorified saints, according to every Arminian, Reformed, Catholic, and Orthodox tradition that reads Revelation, will in the new creation love God forever without sinning. No one thinks the saints in glory retain the ability to sin; the whole point of glorification is that sin is finally gone and cannot return. But then, by Hunt's axiom, the love of the saints in glory is not real love. Heaven itself is not a place of real love. And if heaven can have real love without the ability to sin, then Hunt's axiom is false — and the whole objection to Reformed theology has been sawing off the very branch the gospel sits on.

The Reformed position is that true freedom is not the ability to choose sin but the ability to choose God without impediment. This is the freedom Jesus had. This is the freedom the saints in heaven will have. This is the freedom we presently lack, because Adam's fall bent our wills toward ourselves, and only the effectual call of the Spirit can straighten the bend. This is the freedom we were chosen to receive before we were broken. Hunt's axiom is not biblical; it is an inherited Enlightenment conviction about what freedom must mean. Once the axiom is recognized as optional — as, in fact, unchristological — Hunt's entire case against Reformed theology lies on the floor. The phantom-limb problem that haunts every libertarian account of freedom is the subject of its own page.

What Hunt got right

It would be dishonest and uncharitable to dismiss What Love Is This? without acknowledging what the book got right. Four things, at least.

First, Hunt was correct that the tone of much Reformed writing has been cold. There is a species of Reformed apologetics that has mistaken precision for passion and systematics for worship. When Hunt describes Reformed theology as occasionally arrogant, he is not entirely wrong about how the doctrines have sometimes been held and spoken. The rebuke is received. This site exists, in part, to offer Reformed theology with a different tone — Lewis, Buechner, Spurgeon, Keller — the warmth the doctrines themselves generate when they are believed rather than merely defended.

Second, Hunt was correct that Reformed theology must not soften its own distinctives to make the charge disappear. The temptation to mumble about reprobation, to hide behind "single predestination," to pretend the hard edge is not there — this temptation is real, and it fails both Arminian and Reformed alike. If we do not believe the doctrine, we should say so. If we do, we should say so clearly. Our page on reprobation does not apologize for the doctrine. It does not duck it. Hunt would have hated it. We would rather be hated for the truth than loved for a compromise.

Third, Hunt was correct that Reformed evangelism has sometimes been anemic relative to Arminian evangelism. The charge that five-point Calvinists do not preach to the lost is an old slander — George Whitefield alone would falsify it — but there is a pattern in modern Reformed churches of leaning on the decree in ways that make urgency feel optional. It is not. "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" is preached with full conviction precisely because every one of the elect is going to call. Our zeal ought to exceed, not merely match, the zeal of those who believe they are persuading people without divine help.

Fourth, Hunt was correct — in his better moments — that the cross must be central. Sovereignty is a beautiful doctrine, but sovereignty without the cross becomes cold theism. The Reformed tradition's greatest hymn is not about election; it is about "love divine, all loves excelling" crucified. When Reformed theology gets the proportion wrong — when we talk more about the decrees than about the Crucified — we have wandered from our own center. Hunt's instinct to keep the cross central is right. We just think he did not see that the cross makes most sense when it is the cross that the Father and the Son and the Spirit planned together before the world began.

A word to Hunt's readers

If you came to this page from What Love Is This? — if that book is in your hand or on your shelf or in your memory — I want to speak to you directly for a moment.

You did not read Dave Hunt because you are a bad person. You read him because you love God, you believe God is love, and when someone told you that a theology exists which teaches God condemns people He could have saved, something in you recoiled. That recoil was not sin. It was the Spirit's witness that God is good, and that goodness is non-negotiable. You were right to honor the recoil. You were right to take the charge seriously.

But the recoil alone cannot adjudicate the text. Paul anticipated your recoil in Romans 9:14 and 9:19 — not to mock it, but to walk through it. The man who objects to unconditional election is not necessarily an enemy of God. Very often he is a child of God whose conscience has been trained by half the Bible and is reacting against what looks like an assault on the other half. What you need is not to silence the conscience but to read the whole Bible with the conscience open — and to let Paul's argument go all the way to its conclusion rather than being stopped by the objection at verse 14 or verse 19.

Read Ephesians 1:4-5 slowly. Read John 6:37-44 slowly. Read Romans 9:11-23 slowly, paying attention to what the question is and what the answer is. Read Acts 13:48 noticing which verb is active and which is passive. Read John 10:26-29 and ask yourself who gave the sheep to the Son, and whether anyone can snatch them out of His hand. Read 2 Timothy 1:9 and notice when the grace was given. Let the Bible speak. You will find, as many readers of Hunt have found when they finally let the text past the polemic, that what Hunt called Calvinism is what Paul called grace. The word he could not get past is the word that the Reformed have been protecting all along.

The deepest thing we would say to Dave Hunt

Dave, you fought your whole life for a God big enough to love everyone. You thought we were diminishing Him. What we would say, across the table that is no longer available in this life, is that the God you fought for was smaller than the God who actually loved you. The God of Dave Hunt's What Love Is This? offers His love to everyone and depends on the sinner to activate it. The God of Paul's Romans 9 sets His electing love on a people before time began and accomplishes their salvation whether they were searching or not. That is a larger love. That is a love that does not wait for cooperation. That is the love that chased you from your first breath, through every book you wrote, through every debate you lost to James White, through the quiet years at the end when the body was failing — and met you on the other side of the veil.

You will meet many Calvinists in heaven whose theology you spent years rebutting. They will not gloat. They will hug you, and they will admit that their pens should have been gentler while they had pens, and you will admit, perhaps, that the hymn you wrote your title from had it right the whole time: what love is this, that gave itself for me. Not for me because I chose. For me because He did. The love you were looking for is the love that had already found you.

And to the reader still on this side of the veil, holding Hunt's book and this page open side by side: the love that found Dave Hunt is the love reaching for you. You do not have to activate it. You do not have to prove you deserve it. You cannot outrun it. You will not outlast it. The hands that hold you are not yours. They never were. That is the gospel Hunt could not quite hear, and it is the gospel that will not let you go.

"But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'"

ROMANS 9:20

"For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will."

EPHESIANS 1:4-5

"We love because he first loved us."

1 JOHN 4:19

What love is this? The love that did not wait for you to love back. The love that chose before you were. The love that will not let you go even if you write a book against it. That is the love this site exists to proclaim. That is the love Dave Hunt finally met. That is the love the elect reader of his book, if they keep reading past the polemic, will meet too.