Featured Five Points

Then we can get into absoluteism as well.....and I don't mean the vodka:laugh:

 

fine by us, or by me.
personally, I've been feeling foolish responding to your musings as well.
might as well talk to the old folks at the alzheimer's clinic back in virginia.
what they say makes more sense.
lol.
bye.

 

back to talking to yourself, eh, van ?
just holler "help" if you can't figure out where you are.
:smilewinkgrin:

 

You totally misinterpret that passage!

NO unregenerate sinner can even see their need for salvation, much less try to enetr it in freely of their own "free will!"

 

Can you please cite any Calvinist who made such a claim that you have asserted above?

 

Van, I'd like to leave you alone to talk to yourself but who knows something might get through the thick fog of your rabidly hateful anti-Calvinism. Perhaps you do not know that Calvinists abounded in the history of missions from the beginning.
Just that they did not go 'door knocking' and asking people to accept Jesus as their personal Savior like modern missionaries do.
Yeah, they had tracts and stuff, but for the most part they set up house and did what they could for the locals and invited them to services.
For example, if an old time missionary Calvinist were a doctor, he would go about doing what he could for the locals medically and introduce Christianity in a way that is different from how things are done today.
Did you know, for example, what the soteriology of the likes of David Livingston, William Carey, or Hudson Taylor, was ?
Try doing a little research on your "enemies".
Besides, if God wants to mysteriously save His elect, what have you got against it ?
Oh, yeah, it hurts your pride that you can have no part in the glory.
I get that.

 

Indeed, you did answer my question and I appreciate it. Sorry, I only meant by "please don't tell me what Calvinists believe" that I desired to keep the conversation focused on the particular questions at hand.

It is beyond my finite mind to imagine how God brings a soul into existence. However, I know from my experience that when I am engaged in the creative process that I must conceptualize the object of my creative activity before and as I am creating it. The created thing bears the characteristics that I conceived for it before it is actually realized in time-space. For example, if I desire my final creation to be 'round' then I have first conceived it as 'round' in my mind.

Therefore, it seems to me that God must have conceived 'of' me (with all my attributes) before he brought me into physical existence. God placed me in America, at the turn of the 21st century, as a caucasian; He also set my intellectual limit, and my spiritual destiny. How could He not have? I don't believe God created anything in some sort of directionless vacuum. And all those preceding factors would have absolute bearing on my final condition.

Setting any "inherited sin" aside momentarily, God knew that indeed I would sin and thus He knew me as a sinner from the start (that is, whatever point you may consider your beginning). Someplace between Eternity Past and my entry into the world, God knew me exactly as I am. And He loved me while I was yet a sinner. And He saved me. He put my name in His book.

Are my views very different than yours?

 

When he has to resort to that...shows you he is out of bullets.

 

so, you are saying, Van, that had it not been for missionaries, God's sending His Son to the cruel death of the cross with the end in view of redeeming His people would have been fruitless and futile and the sinless life Christ lived in obedience to His Father, prerequisite to Messiahship, would have been meaningless and powerless ?

 

Your google is out of date. update it, Van.
if you google PB's hard enough, assuming you honestly want to find out more about this 'peculiar people' among God's peculiar peoples you would have found out that there have been, of late, PB's who have gone out on 'mission' fields, from India to the Philippines to parts of Ghana in Africa.

so we are not anti-missionary, per se.

we are anti-missionism which envelops the following ideas:

1. That God uses missions and missionaries to ETERNALLY save people. Christ ALREADY saved whom He wanted saved eternally and to be with Him in His Father's kingdom, that is, the Heaven which is above the heaven of Heavens. This idea stems from erroneously dividing the word, and applying the word 'save' and 'salvation' only to the eternal destination of the soul.

2, That there is to be a board or some kind of body who determines the qualifications of a minister/missionary. We find no such entity in the New Testament;

3. That these or this governing body determines who to support and how much depending, again, on certain criteria. again, PB's find this to be extra-scriptural if not UNscriptural.

4. That those who feel the call to go out 'into the fields of harvest' need to go into seminaries for degrees, or at the very least, dilly-dally until they have PLEDGES of support.
We believe if a man feels in his heart he has been called of God to go out and preach the gospel in foreign lands, then he MUST go hastily with no further delay. One of our elders, of these times, pastored a large PB congregation in the deep South.

He was a doctor by profession with more children than I could count with one hand and he sold EVERYTHING he had and used it to go where he felt called, uprooting his entire family, until his wife had medical issues that needed to be attended here after more than five years in the place where he felt called.

so, again, you do err. not knowing the Scriptures (in regards to missions) and not knowing anything first hand about Primitive Baptists.

 

So, it had nothing to do with China.

John Ryland Jr. denied that his father said any such thing as you said he did.