Steven, I do not know if you are able to hear yourself the way others may be taking this. I know you will not admit to this, but you sound as though you are the only person to have uncovered dirt on the early church fathers and the Reformers. You attempt to defend David because he repented. Fair enough. But are you an expert on the notable figures of church history? You seem to be seeking some sort of purity that even YOU do not possess, save for Christ.
I am not in the business of defending Calvin, Luther, Zwingli et al, but to deny their part in church history would be foolishness. I came to embrace Reformed Theology, not by the persuasive writings of old dead theologians (although their words drove me to search the scriptures). I came to embrace Baptist Reformed Theology because I believe that is what the bible teaches. Does that mean I endorse any and all character flaws that theologians who have predated me possess? Of course not! The Presbyterians persecuted Christians. That is a historical fact. Does that mean there is no value in reading the works of notable Presbyterians? Another emphatic no.
When I read Augustine, Luther, and Calvin on the nature of the will, I see a consistency that all three of these men share. I am then forced to filter their views through the Word of God. Do their words pass the scripture test? That is the scholarly approach.
I wish I had the time to share with you, in detail, the things I wrestled with back in the early 1990's. I came to faith in Christ in 1979. I was immediately thrust into the Jack Chick mold of fundamentalism. I believed the Synergist view of free will because that was all I knew. It was what I was taught. I attended a Synergist bible college, where any challenge to the established norm would result in a swift kick to the curb. It was not until the early 1990's that I started asking questions that those who were in "my camp" did not want to answer.
I made the mistake of studying the Book of Romans. I was playing with a ball of string. I kept pulling on the ball by asking questions. I would have stopped had my questions been answered, but they were not. I kept asking more and more questions until that ball of string became an unwieldy mess. I was troubled by Romans 8:7, "because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so". That passage brought me to 1 Corinthians 2:14, " But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised." This was another passage that was doing very little to soothe my troubled mind. Ephesians 2 was the nail in the proverbial coffin. Ephesians 2:1, "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,". Further down in the chapter I read the following passage, Ephesians 2:4-5 "But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),". What became evident to me was that God was the one who changed the human heart, making it able to believe. If Man was left to his own devices Romans 8:7, 1 Corinthians 2:14, and Ephesians 2:1 made it abundantly clear that the sinful human heart just did not want to believe, it could not. When that truth finally sank into my cranium, my whole world imploded. For me, it was a major crisis. I left Synergism kicking and screaming. It was not a pretty sight.
I did not go directly from Synergism to Reformed Theology. I was a long circuitous route that lead me to the Reformed faith. I am not going to say that I arrived, because the Reformation credo is "Semper Reformanda", or "Always Reforming".
