Featured Romans 9 Isn't What You Think It Is - continued...

But you will interact to the precise degree which your god has predestined, regardless of your "henceforth" attempts to the contrary.

 

The Calvinist take this verse to an extreme that is not supported by scripture.

God does not change in regards to who He is. His righteous character does not change. God is immutably trustworthy, loving and kind to those who love Him and respond to Him in faith and love.....

The Lord is my strength and my shield; My heart trusted in Him, and I am helped; Therefore my heart greatly rejoices, And with my song I will praise Him. (Psalms 28:7)​

....and He is immutably dangerous to His enemies!

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:31)
​

This verse cannot, however, be used to contradict the whole rest of the entire bible to say that God doesn't change in any way whatsoever, as the Calvinists and other Augustinians would have us believe.

God changes His mind all the time! Not in unpredictable or capricious ways for that would be contrary to His righteous character but there are several times in scripture when God said He was going to do one thing and ended up doing something else. He wanted to wipe out Israel for worshiping the golden calf and start over with Moses but changed His mind as Moses' pleading. Lot talked God all the way down to needing to find only a handful of righteous people in Sodom. The whole book of Jonah is all about how God said He was going to destroy Nineveh and ended up sparing them instead and as this thread is specifically about, God intended to return soon and give Israel it's kingdom and instead ended up cutting Israel off, pausing Israel's prophesied program of law (which He will return to in due time) and instead offered salvation to the whole world, including the Jews, through Paul's gospel of grace.

All if this is explained easily, and beautifully in keeping with God's immutable righteous character, in Jeremiah 18 which, as I have established in the opening post, is what Romans 9 is all about.

 

That's what I thought.

So you assume that the doctrines you disagree with are products of various English translations. Great!

Who has ever made such a claim? I have not. Can you name someone who has made this claim? Have they published any books? Is this person anyone that anybody is likely to have every heard of before?

Saying it doesn't make it so!

Quite the contrary! My comment exposes the fact that you don't even know anything about what you're saying! You've never even bothered to pick up a New King James Bible to see whether the doctrines with which you disagree can even be rightly gleaned from it's pages. You simply assume it because you have an axe to grind.

That's ridiculous! Jesus Christ Himself quoted from a Greek translation of the Hebrew bible, which neither you nor anyone with any sort of brain at all could possibly claim was superior to the original and yet the incarnate Creator Himself quoted directly from it, with the alterations from the original included.

If you think that doctrinal disputes didn't exist prior to modern translations of the bible then you're frankly stupid. Which modern translation did Luther use to dispute with the Catholic church? Which modern translation did the Anabaptists use to earn the persecution they suffered under the Catholic church? Which modern translation did the Catholics use to teach indulgences and all the rest of their wicked doctrines? Which modern translation did Augustine use to convince the Catholic church that God cannot change in anyway whatsoever? Which modern translation did "those from James" use to separate themselves from Paul's gentile converts? Which modern translation did the Sadducees use to decide that there was no resurrection from the dead?

There have been doctrinal disputes practically since the beginning of human existence and certainly for the entire duration that God's word has existed in written form and such disputes will continue from now until this Earth no longer exists.

Has it ever occurred to you that the proliferation of such disputes in modern times isn't because of one translation vs another but simply because of the wide availability of God's word all over the place in practically every language and every format that can be imagined. There has never been a time when God's word was more readily available to anyone, anywhere at any time. It's equally available to those who are educated and to those who are not. It's just as available to those who keep to themselves as it is to those who tend to start movements and have people follow them. It would be weird if there weren't a wide proliferation of doctrinal disputes of every kind and description!

And God's word endures! One can just as easily get saved because of what is read in ANY new testament you care to name as they can by reading the KJV version of the same gospel.

I know it for an absolute fact!

It is so much the word of God that it cannot be overcome by translating into another language. I don't care what language its translated into. I don't care how many times its translated into a particular language or by how many different groups of people or for what reason. I doubt even that it would be possible to completely obscure the word of God if doing so was the express intent of those doing the translation. What I know for certain is impossible, is for that to happen without it being ridiculously obvious.

 

This is a long one! No time for editing! Please excuse typos!

I do not debate particular issues on the basis of whether or not they are "true Calvinism" or not. I'm 100% dead serious when I remind people that radishes taste like poison whether you call them radishes or not. I don't care what label you care to put on it, if it is doctrine that is based on the idea that God cannot change in any way whatsoever then I'm going to refer to it as Calvinist. I refer to a lot of what Arminians teach as Calvinism because that's what it is. Technically speaking the most correct terminology would be Augustinianism but hardly anyone knows what that means and its annoying to have to tip toe around using common terms that everyone understands in general because they've figured out some means by which they can rightly claim some substantive disagreement on a particular point here or there.

You're doing sort of the opposite but its just the same thing just applied in the opposite way. You want to throw out half of Calvinism and still call yourself a Calvinist. The two main problems with that is that Calvin's (Augustine's) doctrines are very much a package deal and you don't get to simply pick and choose and, just as importantly, it serves to muddy the water when people try to use common terms to discuss general ideas.

If you want to call yourself a Calvinist while rejecting gigantic portions of what Calvin taught then that's completely fine by me but that doesn't mean that I have to let you off the hook in regards to the logical ramifications of the things that you do hold to. I find it interesting, by the way, that you've mostly talked about the issues that Calvin taught that you reject and hardly mentioned at all the things that he taught that you accept as true. It comes off feeling like you desire the title without the substance that comes with it.

I suspected that you held to this. I don't understand the desire to hold to this belief and reject the logical implications of it. And make no mistake about it. Calvinism and the Augustinian that came before it are rigorously, brutally and efficiently logical derivations from that single premise. All five points of modern Calvinism are logical derived from that premise as are doctrines such as divine impassibility, divine simplicity, the idea that God exists outside of time, that the future is settled (by whatever means) and several other doctrines that have permeated the church since Augustine imported Greek philosophical ideas about God into the Catholic church in the late 3rd and early 4th century.

Yes, it absolutely would refute it!

Are you familiar with the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions? You probably are, but for those reading this that might not be, a necessary condition is when a condition must exist for a proposition to be true and a sufficient condition is when a proposition MUST be true if a condition exists.

If X is a necessary condition for Y then if X is false then Y is false.
If X is a sufficient condition for Y then if X is true then Y is true.

Easy enough, right.

The doctrine of immutability as normally taught by Calvinists (and most any other flavor of Christian for that matter) is a sufficient condition for several doctrines, including but not limited to the following...

Impassibility (God does not experience emotions - or anything else for that matter)
Divine Simplicity (God has no parts - of any kind)
Absolute Divine Sovereignty (i.e. nothing happens that God doesn't command.)
Exhaustive Divine Foreknowledge. (God cannot learn - at all.)
Exhaustive Predestination (Follows from the previous two doctrines.)

If any of those things (and a few others) aren't true then it would imply some form of change in God and He would therefore not be immutable. Therefore, if God is immutable then those doctrine MUST be true. If God is mutable IN ANY WAY then that one fact is not sufficient, by itself, to disprove these other doctrines (it is a gigantic step in that direction), but falsifying any one of those doctrines does falsify the doctrine of immutability.

No! It was a joke.

I'm definitely no Arminian! They're way too Calvinistic! (That's sort of a joke too, but only sort of.)

This claim is not only false its completely unsupportable! Where did you ever learn this?

Define "paradox", David! Seriously, take the time and think through just what it is you mean by the term "paradox" and see if you can distinguish that concept from the concept of "contradiction". I'd bet dollars to donuts that you won't be able to and that what you are actually stating here is that we are to expect open contradictions to exist within our worldview that we except as truth.

If that is the case then I ask you how we are to tell the "true contradictions" from false ones. Maybe David Koresh's claim to be a "sinning Messiah" wasn't false, maybe is was just a mystery, a theological paradox that we aren't able to understand or explain and that we ought not even try to understand or explain because to do so is antithetical to faith and piety.

That's precise the same thinking that Calvinists use every day and twice on Sundays. They just plug in their doctrine of arbitrary predestination in place of Koresh's sinning Messiah doctrine. How would you refute either claim if contradiction are to be excepted as truth? How?

You couldn't! If truth can contradict itself then truth is synonymous with error and falsehood. Such an attitude does not raise theology above intellectual pursuits it demotes it to the level of fantasy! God thought are HIGHER than our thoughts - NOT LOWER! God implores us to "Come, let us reason together!" How can that be done if truth and error are the same thing?

As I have told you repeatedly already, this is double talk on their part. It is literally them wanting it both ways. To use your terminology, they are accepting this as a "paradox" but what they mean by "paradox" is "a contradiction that they want to believe as truth in spite of the fact that it makes no sense". And what's more is that they do this for the purpose of preserving the doctrine of absolute divine immutability. If you remove that single pagan doctrine, all the motive for shutting down of the mind goes away.

This is a false dichotomy. The two extremes are not the only two options. There are things that God has predestined and that absolutely will happen no matter what because God is going to force it to happen. There are also things that are not predestined in any hard sense of the word but that God can very accurately predict and is not surprised by in the least. There are yet other things that are also not predestined in any hard sense of the word but that God desires to see come to pass and that He works to bring to pass in various ways, including working with, through or in spite of those people involved. And there are things that God does not know are going to come to pass but is able to react to with wisdom, righteousness and power.

Why is that so hard for people to except? Is that not precisely what we see God doing throughout the scripture? It's not a lot different in principle to what you do in your everyday life. You have desires, you make plans and you set out to make those plans come to pass. You completely suck at it compared to God because God has more information, He is wiser and far more powerful and patient than you are, but, in principle, it is the same thing. Why insist on believing that God is incapable of winning if He hasn't fixed the game in advance? Why believe that God would break if something trivial thing happened He didn't want to happen or that He didn't see coming from a million eons away?

Continued....

 

That IS NOT what "paradox" means!

Look, I accept that there are a great many things about God that we will never understand - NEVER. There are some things that we can't understand now but will better understand when we see Him face to face. These things have to do with issues were we have a lack of information and/or a lack of context that is required to comprehend the way certian things work. The easiest example of this is the doctrine of the Trinity where there is One and only One God which exists in three co-equal but yet distinct persons that we know as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We don't have the information needed to quite fully grasp how that works but it is important here to point out that we are not asked to accept a contradiction here! There is NOTHING contradictory about the Trinity doctrine as taught in the scripture (i.e. there are sects of Christianity that do indeed teach contradictions in this area).

It is help here to define the term "contradiction". A key to understand this is to understand that two truth claims that contradict each other cannot both be true in the SAME CONTEXT. So if one says that the sky is blue and another says the the sky is yellow then we know one of two things are true. Either one of them is wrong or they are not talking about the same sky at the same time (i.e. one is speaking in another context). Thus, the same context is a necessary condition for a contradiction to exist.

The doctrine of the Trinity does NOT teach that God is singular and that He is also plural in the same context. On the contrary, there is one sense in which God is singular and, in another sense, there is a plurality in God. The doctrine does not teach that in the same sense that God is One, He is also Three. That would be a contradiction and therefore cannot be true because truth in not contradictory, by definition.

That is a true statement in general terms, there's no doubt about it!

But it is not universally true! It has never been true of me, so far as I can ever remember. There was a time when I was a child when I thought as a child and believed what I was taught to believe but even as early as 6th grade I was beginning to think through the doctrines that I was being taught and trying my best to make sense of them. I was accepting some a rejecting others but not arbitrarily nor on the basis of mere personal preference but on the basis of whether they made sense, as in logical sense. I knew as a child that there was such a thing as objective truth and I understood intuitively that contradictory claims must necessarily include falsehood. The challenge was to discover which was false and have the courage to reject it as such.

You, I think, are misunderstanding my intent. I do not care what these people call themselves. That isn't the point I am making at all.

The point can be expressed in a single sentence....

Ideas have consequences and words mean things!

You simply don't get to redefine commonly understood terms and then insist that I go along with you and threaten to take your ball and go home if I don't! That isn't how rational discourse works and it isn't even honest. The fact of the matter is that if you depart in some significant manner away from what Calvin taught and what Calvinists have believed and taught for centuries then on what basis would even want to claim to be a Calvinist?

As for me, I don't really care what you call yourself. I wasn't kidding earlier when I said that Arminianism is to Calvinistic! There is a gigantic swath of Christian sects that I consider to be, if not Calvinist, then at least Calvinistic and I will commonly refer to them their doctrines as Calvinism whether they call themselves Calvinists or not. In fact, I can't even remember the last time anyone got in a twist with me because I DIDN'T want to call them a Calvinist. It's almost always the other way around. Calvinism covers such a broad spectrum of doctrines that it's difficult for someone to not qualify as a Calvinist to one degree or another in my mind. So, in short, if you want to call yourself a Calvinist then you go right ahead. It's no skin off my nose! My only point here is that the things you believe about the nature of God have logical consequences that WILL FORCE you to choose between accepting the whole of Calvinism or accepting that your beliefs are self-contradictory. The only third option is rejecting Calvinism entirely, including all of the pagan doctrines upon which it is logically derived, chief among them being Aristotle's notion of divine immutability.

 

You're a liar.

I'll read nothing else your write until your repent of this blatant lie.

 

Saying it doesn't make it so!

Liar.

You may well have made arguments over the years but that has nothing to do with why you have nothing to offer of any substance against what I presented. If you had anything at all, wild horses couldn't pull you away from your computer keyboard.

You are a fool. Please just put me on ignore. You are a completely idiotic waste of time.

 

No, not really. I've been doing this too long to think that's at all likely. If it happens at all, it comes as a shock and as an incredibly pleasant surprise. I do this primarily for my own benefit. I expose myself to various views and to various ways that people respond to my doctrine. I keep hoping to find someone who can present a challenge to my way of thinking that is honest, intelligent and engaging and I routinely get disappointed by thin-skinned cry babies and liars. Christians that participate on internet forums are, by and large, the most dishonest people I have ever encountered and I haven't seen a cogent argument against a syllable of my doctrine in years. It's nothing but cliche and intentionally anti-intellectual and flagrantly irrational, blind beliefism, similar to much of the things you've said to me in the last few posts. Most Christians wouldn't know a rational argument from a Road Runner cartoon.

I can tolerate that sort of thing. I'd have good reason not to but it's so universally pervasive, the alternative would be to not participate in these forums at all. What I do not tolerate is when someone accuses me of being dishonest, especially when that someone just got through admitting to me that their own doctrine does not make sense and that it's somehow wrong for me to expect doctrine to make sense.

 

You yourself point out the hugely important differences between your doctrine and traditional Calvinism and yet insist on calling yourself a Calvinist anyway and then you accuse me of "making up whatever definition of Calvinism I want"! It's so stupid that one would normally think it was some sort of joke!

That is a level of dishonesty and hypocrisy that I don't know how to deal with and will not tolerate. You can repent of it or prove that you're either a liar or that you're just stupid to the point of delusion. I certainly hope you choose to repent because it seems like productive discussion with you is at least possible and I enjoy the exchange but I do have to draw the line somewhere.