Featured Misunderstanding Unlimited Atonement.

Good post and good questions/points

Yes, faith is a gift of God. Completely agree. As I said in numerous posts, faith is NOT a synergistic work. Neither is repentance or calling on the name of the Lord, or receiving the gift of salvation. All of these things FLOW from the grace of God and are mere responses to the work of the Holy Spirit. There is no merit or effectual working power in anything WE DO. All the merit and power of salvation comes from God. SO the charge of synergism is BOGUS.

Yes, all that the Father gives Jesus will come to Him, no doubt. And I do not believe that God learns that we will believe when "He looks down the corridors of time to see who will believe." Why on earth would God have to look down the corridors of time when HE IS ALREADY OMNISCIENT? EQUALLY, God did not at some point in time decide/decree to create a Kosmos, allow the fall, and send a Saviour, as if it was ever a new idea that came into His mind, (it was eternally present to Him) These are silly ideas of man who impotently try to explain things outside of their grasp by using extapolation instead of the scriptures. If God is perfectly OMNISCIENT (which He is), all of these things were known to Him from eternity past. He is immutable. The depths of His knowledge do not diminish or increase. He has perfect knowledge from of all things from eternity past to eternity future. So God knew who were His before they were born, even before the foundation of the KOSMOS. But that does not mean He sat down and said "I save you", "I save you not"...

There is something in election THAT NNE UNDERSTANDS. On this I agree with Calvinists

SO you have the same question and difficulty we do.

That is why I say NEITHER ARMINIANS NOR CALVINISTS hold ELECTION in perfect knowledge. Our knowledge of such things is as "looking through a glass darkly".

I know that God knew His own before they were born, and He gave them to Christ. But I believe that "given to Christ" and "appointed to believe" is according to God's perfect foreknowledge not only of His creatures (which Calvinists emphasize) but also of all events and actions.

SO you say the Phillipian Jailer had to believe. But the belief was a gift of God. Same thing I say. But even though it came from God, he was believing. It does not say that God believed for Him. It is an active imperative to the jailer "you must believe". So according to some people's definition of synergism, this would be synergism.

 

so questions for the Calvinists...

a. Where does it say IN THE BIBLE that Christ died ONLY for the Elect?

 

DO you think when the Philippian jailer asked Paul what he must do to be saved (passage in question) he was asking how to be PROGRESSIVELY saved and how to make his salvation permanent? And you think that is how Paul understood his question? And how the Philippian jailer understood Paul's answer?

quote (PS: I might take your postings more seriously if you would proofread before posting. Fairly simple words misspelled don't engender a lot of confidence in your cognition.)

I can speak eloquently with a nice vocabulary with the best of them (but I don't feel the need to try to inpress anyone) and only mispell sometimes because I have a VISION problem.

Maybe you should not use so much insulting language. It's not Christlike

 

And the question is not is "resist" a verb or if resist is an act, rather the question is if not doing something qualifies as an action.

Is not building a house an action?

 

http://www.englishgrammar.org/negative-verb-forms/

 

I never said "not resisting" is doing nothing. I said a negative verb form does not describe an action. Just like not drinking beer is not an action, not picking my nose is not an action, not misexegeting Acts 16 like T. Cassidy does (see post 95 for my comments) is not an action, and not deliberately misrepresenting people (like T Cassidy does) is not an action.

You defined synergism as two or more agents working together to create a combined effect that is greater tthan the sum of their seperate effects. And you accuse us of believing in synergism in regeneration.

You do not know what synergism is, even though you posted a definition of it. You can not name ONE valid way that Arminians say that we cooperate with God to produce a greater effect than the SUM of His and our seperate effects IN REGENERATION. Seeing I have repeately said that ONLY GOD PRODUCES REGENERATION, you either don't know what synergism means, don't comprehend it's meaning, or you are DELIBERATELY misrepresenting my position.

To say we believe in synergism in regeneration, then BY YOUR DEFINITION we cooperate with God in regeneration to CAUSE A GREATER EFFECT THAN the SUM of the SEPERATE EFFECTS of WHAT GOD WOULD PRODUCE IN OUR REGENERATION and the effect of us regenerating ourselves Who ever said such a thing. So synergism is a nonsensical term used to misrepresent other people's positions

You lose.

Unless you give a rational answer to this (except lame insults and misrepresentations), I will not reply to you again. I will accept your non answer as an admittance that you were wrong when you called us synergists.

 

Agreed that God must intervene.

To simplify things, here is what I am saying. Anyone who accuses Arminians of believing in synergism in regeneration is either ignorant of what the word means, ignorant of what Arminians believe or dishonest. I have clearly stated and clearly demonstrated that I am not a synergist, so that leaves only two options here.

Let me say it clearly.

Definition of synergism-the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

Synergism would be God and man interacting or cooperating in order to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their (God's and man's) seperate effects. As far as I know, no-one believes that man adds any effect to regeneration, but that it is a work of God. God's part is to regenerate. Our part is to believe. We don't regenerate ourselves and God does not believe on Himself in our behalf

SO anyone who uses the word synergism in the way that it has been used in theology is using VERY, VERY IMPRECISE LANGUAGE

 

We know that Christ died for His sheep. But where does it say that He did not die for all?

Tell me, what is your understanding of Matthew 13:44?

 

a. All things are certain in God's perfect foreknowlege but yet they are contingent in time. One phrase refers to eternity and God's infinite foreknowledge and the other phrase refers to time. God is not limited by time or space, so the limitations of contingency do not apply to Him. They apply to us, but not to Him, because He is God and we are not.

b. If you thnk you have perfect knowledge, you don't know anything. And if you don't have perfect knowledge, you have imperfect knowledge by default.

No, that is not what monergism means. Monos means one and egos means work. Meaning ONE DOES THE WORK. To use the word in any other way is to use IMPRECISE LANGUAGE, though many do use imprecise language when using the terms monergism and synergism, to be sure