Please Biblically Show Why The 5 Points Of Arminianism Are Correct?

1.) Free-Will or Human Ability

Although human nature was seriously affected by the fall, man has not been left in a state of total spiritual helplessness. God graciously enables every sinner to repent and believe, but He does not interfere with man's freedom. Each sinner possesses a free will, and his eternal destiny depends on how he uses it. Man's freedom consists of his ability to choose good over evil in spiritual matters; his will is not enslaved to his sinful nature. The sinner has the power to either cooperate with God's Spirit and be regenerated or resist God's grace and perish. The lost sinner needs the Spirit's assistance, but he does not have to be regenerated by the Spirit before he can believe, for faith is man's act and precedes the new birth. Faith is the sinner's gift to God; it is man's contribution to salvation.


I don't think I can completely agree with this, especially the with the way it is worded. I believe that man has a choice to make, accept salvation and live, or reject it, and die. The call goes to all, but only those who choose to obey the call will be saved. Man can not do this until he/she is first called of God.


Conditional Election

God's choice of certain individuals unto salvation before the foundation of the world was based upon His foreseeing that they would respond to His call. He selected only those whom He knew would of themselves freely believe the gospel. Election therefore was determined by or conditioned upon what man would do. The faith which God foresaw and upon which He based His choice was not given to the sinner by God (it was not created by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit) but resulted solely from man's will. UGH!!!!!It was left entirely up to man as to who would believe and therefore as to who would be elected unto salvation. God chose those whom He knew would, of their own free will, choose Christ. Thus the sinner's choice of Christ, not God's choice of the sinner, is the ultimate cause of salvation.


So, eventhough I do believe in free will, man can not respond until He calls. He can not believe until God shows them how lost they really are. Faith comes from God, period!!


Universal Redemption or General Atonement

Christ's redeeming work made it possible for everyone to be saved but did not actually secure the salvation of anyone. Although Christ died for all men and for every man, only those who believe on Him are saved. His death enabled God to pardon sinners on the condition that they believe, but it did not actually put away anyone's sins. Christ's redemption becomes effective only if man chooses to accept it.


I guess I agree with this......I guess. That which I bolded is something I don't entirely understand. W/O Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, no one's sins would have been put away. Maybe someone can enlighten me on what this is actually saying???



The Holy Spirit Can Be Effectually Resisted


The Spirit calls inwardly all those who are called outwardly by the gospel invitation; He does all that He can to bring every sinner to salvation. But inasmuch as man is free, he can successfully resist the Spirit's call. The Spirit cannot regenerate the sinner until he believes; faith (which is man's contribution) precedes and makes possible the new birth. Thus, man's free will limits the Spirit in the application of Christ's saving work. The Holy Spirit can only draw to Christ those who allow Him to have His way with them. Until the sinner responds, the Spirit cannot give life. God's grace, therefore, is not invincible; it can be, and often is, resisted and thwarted by man.


I agree that grace can be resisted, for I did this for years. Now, faith is man's contribution, I agree, but this faith comes from God, and not from man himself.



Falling from Grace

Those who believe and are truly saved can lose their salvation by failing to keep up their faith, etc. All Arminians have not been agreed on this point; some have held that believers are eternally secure in Christ - that once a sinner is regenerated, he can never be lost.



Nope!!! I completely disagree with this. God is able to keep that which I committed into His hands against that day.......I committed my life to Him, and He will keep me, preserve me, and take me home when He calls me home!!

 

I'm simply amazed at the error, misrepresentation, and the maligning of Calvinists, and Calvin himself being displayed on here from "seekingthetruth."

So many things you've said are caustic, wrong, fallacious, unfounded, blatantly false, misinformation, and fictitious.

That you've "allegedly" studied Calvin at a Bible college and still hold to erroneous views of him, and of those who accept his theology is telltale enough.

I believe you're clueless to describe and concisely teach against his theology which I've just began to look into. Everything here from you is basically just a rant, with no substance whatsoever.

I hope any pulpit (if any) presentations are not of this same perfunctory preparation and delivery.

Please bring some substantiated, documented, and thought-out arguments with real substance other than mere disdain for something you clearly do not understand.

 

Are you also amazed at the error and misrepresentation of JesusFan, who think that if one is not a Calvinist then one must be a Arminian?

 

So, in other words, individual election does not exist...

 

I thought everyone named "John" had to be a calvinist!!! :smilewinkgrin:

(Calvin, MacArthur, Piper, Knox, Bunyan...etc.)

 

Hi Convicted1, you posted and wrote:

Christ's redeeming work made it possible for everyone to be saved but did not actually secure the salvation of anyone. Although Christ died for all men and for every man, only those who believe on Him are saved. His death enabled God to pardon sinners on the condition that they believe, but it did not actually put away anyone's sins. Christ's redemption becomes effective only if man chooses to accept it.

I guess I agree with this......I guess. That which I bolded is something I don't entirely understand. W/O Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, no one's sins would have been put away. Maybe someone can enlighten me on what this is actually saying???


Calvinism reverses the order of many facets of Biblical Salvation. Their backward view has the sins of the supposedly pre-chosen elect "put away" when Christ died, i.e. immediate application of the benefit of God accepting Christ's sin offering for the forgiveness of sin. However this view would limit the reconciliation to the elect only, thus Christ did not die, in the mistaken view of Calvinism, for everyone, but only for supposedly previously chosen individuals. This is the "L" in the TULIP, Limited atonement, and is false doctrine.

Now what the Bible actually teaches is God is reconciling the world, meaning he has not reconciled everyone who will be reconcilied yet [at least at the time Paul wrote this truth] and so the Calvinist view is unbiblical. Paul's phrase, reconciling the world, does not tell us whether God will reconcile everyone or not just like when I say I am buying the fuel, it does not say I bought all the fuel. So 2 Corinthians 5:19 says Christ's sacrifice was for the purpose of God "reconciling" the world. Then in verse 20 we see that the reconciliation needs to be "received" and thus we beg the lost "be reconciled to God." This demonstrates that "it [Christ's death and the finished work of the cross] did not actually put away anyone's sins." For that to happen, a person must "receive" the reconciliation.

But to muddy the waters a tad, because only by very careful study will you come to the truth, Romans 5 must be understood to be saying the exact same thing.

In verse 6 (Romans 5:6) Paul tells us Christ died for the ungodly. Since all mankind is ungodly this could refer to all mankind, my view, but as in "reconciling the world" it might only refer to some of the ungodly. Determining the scope or extent of the action takes careful consideration of all the passages on the topic.

In verse 8 we see that at a minimum, Christ died for the church, all those subsequently saved. Verse 9 tells us that once we have received the reconciliation provided by Christ's death, a past event, we shall also we saved from the wrath of God (condemned to Hades and Gehenna) in the future. Verse 10 refers to this past event, having received the reconciliation, and our future eternal life with Christ. Next, in verse 11, Paul makes clear he is talking about those who have received the reconciliation. Verse 17 also makes it clear we must "receive" the reconciliation.

How does one "receive" the reconciliation provided by Christ's finished work of the cross? By trusting in Him, for whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. If we believe from the heart, rather than simply a profession of faith, God will credit our faith, as worthless as it may be, as righteousness, Romans 4:4-5, and put us spiritually "in Christ" where our sins are removed, the circumcision of Christ, thus receiving the reconciliation, provided by Christ's death.

In summary, God is reconciling the world, one sinner at a time, through the ministry of Christ and us as ambassadors of Christ.

 

Oh I do understand it, and consider it bologney.

John

 

Spurgeon

http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0531.htm

Here is a snip from this

In our own day certain preachers assure us that a man must he regenerated before we may bid him believe in Jesus Christ; some degree of a work of grace in the heart being, in their judgment, the only warrant to believe. This also is false. It takes away a gospel for sinners and offers us a gospel for saints. It is anything hut a ministry of free grace.
C. H. Spurgeon

I use to be a Arminian, thinking everything depended on me that Calvinist like Spurgeon helped me to come to the truth, but on the next note there is some Calvinist that wasn't my cup of tea, but Calvinist that had great influences on others. I am not going to speak against men I don't really know in my opinion they went against my signature.

 

Soapbox coming...

Most people here are not actual arminians. They are semi-pelagian. Classic arminianism was born out of reformation theology as the 3rd remonstrant demonstrates. They believed in total depravity. They just went about fixing that problem a different way than calvinists.

However semi-pelagians believe that man has the ability to believe w/out God's prior regenerative intervention. That is the major distinction.

So the correct question should be, please show us biblically why semi-pelagianism is correct (although I think you already started a similar thread for that).

 

1 Peter 1:23
For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

John 6:63
The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life.

Many believe the word of God is the regenerating power without it no one can come to Christ. You can not be regenerated without the word. No man is being regenerated before the word came to them.

The word places two roads before us to believe in Jesus and be saved or not and continue to condemnation.

Those who are being saved or condemned isn't because of the will of man their decision or by heredity but by the will of God because of His word.

That God has placed life and death before us, so choose Jesus and live.

My debt for my sin is death, a debt I cannot pay and be saved so I am saved by grace.

Psalm 73:28
But it is good for me to draw near to God: I have put my trust in the Lord GOD, that I may declare all thy works

Romans 4:
4 Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. 5 However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness.

 

It's very sad to see some on here speaking the things that have been spoken about other believers in this thread. It's one thing to disagree and state your view. It's another thing to show malice towards others.

Matt has a good point. Just because someone is not a Calvinist, doesn't mean they believe all the points of Arminianism. People will however lean one direction or another.

Totally uncalled for and a total lie about believers here on this board. First, you made a statement that said Calvinist do something. Do you have any evidence to backup such a statement. Who are these Calvinist that you have heard preach and do you have a log of when they preach on Christ vs Calvin. Or did you just totally make it up? Why would you do that to other believers?

Also, no Calvinist teaches that Calvin gets anyone to heaven.

 

Before stepping on a soap box it would help to know what you want to proclaim

The claim most here are semi-pelagian is one of pure ignorance, and quite silly. Either you do not know what that doctrine teaches or what "most" here believe. Since there are even calvinists here that do not believe in pre-faith regeneration, are you going to claim they too are semi-pel?

 

I apologise

I apologise for making such a wide sweeping statement about Calvinists, I was wrong to do so.

Let me rephrase my statement to this:

Most of the Calvinists that I know personally seem to spend more time trying to convert Christians to Calvinism than they do trying to convert lost people to Christianity.

Again, I am sorry for not thinking that out before I posted it. Please forgive me.

John

 

Apology accepted.

 

When we have made our own little box and made all these other boxes that if someone is not in our box, then they have to be in these other boxes.

God can't be contained in a box, He is bigger than anything.

It is an ever growing and maturing process, if we stop growing and maturing we are dead.

If we ever think we are maturer than anyone else, to God you will always be a child.

We have so much to learn from God you will never reach to a point of maturity than God Himself.

We are to live on every word that comes from the mouth of God, we should never be satisfied in a box, because the word of God is eternal, never ending, growing in our hearts, forever changing us.

 

I feel confident in what I proclaim.

Like the label or not, most here that are non-calvies are not actually arminian but semi-pelagian. They are the "chosen but free" Geisler brand which is semi-pelagianism. This is not pure arrogance. And labeling someone is not arrogance either. It is classifying the distinctions. So chillax.

BTW... those "calvies" who do not hold to regeneration causing faith are not calvies. Now they may label themselves as calvies just as Geisler called himself a moderate/modified calvie. But calvinistic doctrine (the correct classifying distinction) would hold to regen. causing faith.

Yet again, labels are the problems that people are hung up on. They dont bother me too much. But labels need to be correctly applied. Thus my distinction between a semi-pelagian and an arminian.

Even more, the concept of the 5 points of arminianism is incorrect unless you are referring to the 5 remonstrants.

 

Sort of. People tend to think incorrectly, and lump all non-cals into the Arminian group by label. I simply refer to them as Christians who are non-cal.

- Peace

 

...yep. As you continue on the same misinformed path with no substance to back up your disdain.