Featured Non-Calvinist Help- Questions

being at the mercy of God means that I cannot do anything. God must do it for me - ie regenerate my heart granting to me repentance and faith.

doesn’t scripture say of God “I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy”?

who do we think that we are to question God and His motives? It is certainly not smart

 

I've said this 100 times. Man has a free will. But not an autonomous will that is neutral or positive towards God and negative towards sin. Secondly, all the Calvinists preachers I know of, including the famous ones like Owen and Edwards certainly do preach repentance toward God and faith in Christ. That is simply a fact.

And you should too. If it is not decisive then while it maybe is nice to experience, it is not essential. If that is not an uncomfortable conclusion for you then you really are a Pelagian. The logical conclusion would be that all that is going on in salvation is man just manning up, turning to God, and starting anew. Too much scripture refutes that.

 

I think you need to look in a dictionary and se what mercy means. Your understanding is the most illogical one I have heard.

To save you time
Mercy
compassionate or kindly forbearance shown toward an offender, an enemy, or other person in one's power; compassion, pity, or benevolence:

 

That would depend upon what you mean by autonomous. Does man have the ability to make rational decisions regarding his salvation, yes. Does it mean man can save himself,no. Man's free will is not a static thing as you seem to portray it. Man can have positive or negative feelings toward God prior to and even after one is saved. The alternative to man not having an actual free will that allows him to make those salvation decisions is that God then becomes the one causing the choice thus those condemned have the prefect excuse don't they.

Did I say the calvinists preachers do not preach repentance toward God and faith in Christ, NO. I am just saying it is inconsistent with their theology as calvinists. How many times have you heard or read a calvinist say you must repent, you must trust, you must believe and all the time knowing that their theology says man can not do what they are saying for them to do because they are all spiritually dead.

If, as you say, the influence of the Holy Spirit is decisive then that means the whole world should be saved. At least if you are a consistent calvinist you do.
Joh 16:8 "And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:

That verse does not leave you any wiggle room.

You can not say God is just and then say that He holds man responsible for not doing something He does not allow them to do.
By the way I am not saying God has to be fair, that is just a calvinist smoke screen they like to throw up. Repeat He does not have to be fair but He does have to be just.

If man does not have the ability to make an actual free choice then he does not have a choice. Calvinist want God to determine all things but then say man can make real choices, you can not have it both ways

 

It really does come down to how you look at our free will. I think that scripture adequately portrays us as not wanting to do God's will and as not interested in spiritual things. When scripture talks about us being without light and not understanding it is more than lacking information or teaching. It is more of a mindset and inclination. The problem is that this mindset is who we are. It reflects our own desires and the way we want to be so yes, we can be held responsible for that. And, God is perfectly just if he respects our natural inclinations and free will and chooses not to intervene. (Or, to intervene and then judicially withdraw after any amount of enlightening or conviction he sees fit.) I don't know why that would be a valid excuse if people are allowed to live out their lives according to their own rational will, following their inclinations.

Now I think it bothers you that some of the great Calvinist preachers don't always seem to preach in exact accordance to the TULIP. But the TULIP as well as the confessions are guidelines and frameworks. Owen takes scores of pages explaining what later became the "T" in TULIP. And he covers every single scripture I know of that involves this. But for a quick response to the 5 points the Arminians came up with they used TULIP. I wouldn't worry about it and I would read Owen on this. And you don't have to accept everything he says. I can tell you are using Lennox in some of your posts. I like him too and use him. In fact my pastor recommends him. I do think he oversimplifies the other way though when it comes to free will of man.

By the way, modern young, restless and reformed Calvinists should also spend more time with Owen rather than reading about Owen. I notice an oversimplified quick response type of theology that makes sense in our world of tweets and 1 minute videos, but does not do justice to the issues involved. I have noticed that 15 years ago the young Calvinists were giving their pastors fits with these quick "gotcha" type points. But the rebuttal has gotten up to speed with some of the more recent books, Lennox being one of the better ones.

 

First off you are approaching this from a deterministic perspective. God would know that there would be a fall but He did not need to will it to happen. Just as He knew the Satan would rebel and the 1/3 of the angels would go with him. My logic is "he did not desire" it so it was not "His hidden/secret/ultimate will was for mankind to fall"

Why are you struggling with God allowing the fall? Could that be because you do not believe that God gave man an actual free will?
Look at Gen 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat;.
Question, did the man eat the fruit of that tree? How was he able to do that? Free will or God went against His own command in which case that would make any command of God suspect. Did He really mean what He had commanded? Who could know?

Now lets look at Cain. Did God cause him to kill his brother or did Cain choose on his own to do so? We see from a prior conversation that God had with Cain that Cain was not happy. Gen_4:6-7 We see that God was telling Cain he could make a choice.
If you do well... will you not be accepted?
if you do not do well, sin lies at the door
but you should rule over it.
God obviously said Cain could make real free will choices.

I must admit that your logic of what glorifies God is a bit suspect. He brings a few people to heaven and sends a large number to hell so as far as His stated desire goes He was a looser. And you think that glorifies Him? How?

Then you say He is glorified through His "His Righteous Judgment". But If, as calvinism say, God determined all that would happen and all the sins of man then how does that equate to righteous judgement to judge people for things they had not option not to do?

Calvinism seems to have a number of logic problems and that is aside from all the ones they have with scripture.

You wrote "we would both agree that God created a world that the majority will be judged for their sin in Hell. We have to remember that we both agree that he knew all outcomes in advance which means He knew that only a few would be saved."

But you need to remember that we see that coming about for entirely different reasons. Your determinism and my free will.

 

Yes I would agree that man generally wants to distance themselves from God but that is not a given. That is the thing with free will man can actually think about things and make rational choices. You refer to our natural inclinations and free will but you also for some reason then want to limit what man can do with that free will. It seems you want to hold the string so you can pull the person back from trusting in God of their own free will but then hold them responsible for not choosing God. Man either has a free will or he does not. Whether he leans toward sin or God is dependent on the man. What you call man's natural inclinations if they are determined by God are not free are they. Free will means free will, it is not what he might do or even that most do it is what that person does with their free will that matter to that man as far as eternity is concerned.

Now why do you think it would bother me that calvinists preach biblical free will. I would wish that they would all do that and forget their errant calvinist theology of a select special class. I understand that you think the TULIP is biblical but I see it as a disgrace in the way it distorts God's love for His creation. Yes I have used Lennox but also Barnes and Schaff and Clarke and even Calvin. All these men may express a point that I am trying to make better than I can. But the standard is the word of God.

Adrian Rogers said it well and this is where I stand
I’m willing to compromise about many things, but not the Word of God.

I know you will disagree but I see to many calvinists that are willing to compromise God's word so that it fit's calvinist theology. And that problem can be found on both sides of the debate.

I would modify your comment a bit, "the modern young, restless and reformed Calvinists should spend more time with the bible rather than reading about the bible." And that does not just go for them but for all Christians. The bible is the source of our theology not some book or person that tells us what the bible says.
People are not interested in rolling up their sleeves and digging out the gold themselves. They just want to be told what to think. That is why we have so many biblically illiterate Christians today.

 

Oh I keep track of them all right… for instance that John MacArthur fellow with his Lordship Salvation nonsense shows that legalism is alive and well in some of these churches. I’ve not really been interested in following the guys progression but I do know that he is responsible for splitting up churches that were all ready operating without this guys puritanical theories. Suddenly there were people attending church who wanted to convert the church to puritanical standards. I would rank the guy a High Calvinist and would not be surprised if he came out of the closet as an Absolute Predestinarian. That mindset only serves to break up churches by imposing different beliefs on churches that don’t know any better thus dividing the church.

 

I agree that we would probably just go in circles in our discussion. You have mentioned the calvinist understanding of free will a couple of times and that would be a real sticking point.

God has given man the real ability to choose otherwise, to look at various options and choose one or the other. That is free will.

The calvinist see free will as the ability of man to choose only what God has determined that they choose. They will use the cover of well man just choose from his nature but overlook the fact that under calvinism God has determined their nature.

I see man choosing from a real God given free will and calvinist's see man choosing from a sudo free will.

 

I will admit that I have a rather simple view of salvation, one either believes in Christ Jesus or they do not. I guess you could call it the Occam's razor approach.

These two verses say it all:
Joh 3:17 "For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
Joh 3:18 "He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

That is why I can have strong disagreements with fellow Christians over various biblical issues but do not question their salvation.

 

I think it is a given and would say that if you observe men appearing receptive to the gospel and moving toward Christ you are observing the influence of the Holy Spirit. Where I would disagree with many Calvinists is that the interaction between a man and God is not spelled out to us and is a combination of God acting sovereignly through circumstances, conviction, enlightening and so on. And it may be over time and during that time period there may be judgement occurring and due to set obstinance, love of sin and such there is the chance that the grace may indeed fail and the Spirit's influence may withdraw. But since none of us will come without this work of the Spirit then in cases where it results in a person being saved it was "overcoming" or "effectual" which is a better term than irresistible. The fact that Calvinists just say "T" and "I" and then scream heretic if anyone wants to discuss what is happening is unfortunate - but that doesn't mean the Arminian explanation was the right answer either. Owen felt the need to spend a whole chapter in Book three on "Corruption or depravation of the mind by sin" where he goes over all this and explains every scripture on the subject I have ever seen. Once again, you can reject or accept his philosophy as you wish. I myself am not sure I go for all of it but you cannot use the argument that you only use scripture, so does he, and you cannot say it's just theology while not recognizing that he is trying to refute someone else who came up with - theology.

 

Where you see the influence as decisive the real world experience shows us that it is not. Although the Holy Spirit convicts the whole world not all people come to faith do they, thus we can see that conviction does not always result in conversion. We know that God will use various means to influence a person but at the end it is still the person that has to decide whether to trust in or reject Christ Jesus. That is why a just God can hold them responsible for their choices. As I see it where your view fails is when you fall back to irresistible influence as the deciding factor. Man is taken out of the equation, it is not him making the decision it is the Holy Spirit. From what you said if the Holy Spirit withdraws His influence then there is nothing the person can do as far as coming to God. So your view falls back to the "I" of TULIP which I do not see any biblical support for.

As for Owen, yes he had a opinion and as you said I can reject or accept his philosophy. While I will read and sometimes even quote various authors it is only to get a different perspective on a text or because they are better at expressing the point I am trying to make.

 

No. It's still decisive if it was necessary for those who do get saved. You are the one starting with an assumption that it is not really essential. That's why even Calvinists like Sproul prefer the term "effectual" grace to irresistible grace. And remember, in case you are tempted to say that they can't change the TULIP or they are not real Calvinists, the earliest mention of the acronym TULIP was around 1900 or so, last time I checked.

Man does make the decision. It's your erroneous view of free will that is causing you problems.

Yes. Because they are being judicially left to their own inclinations. You see this when God gives them over to a reprobate mind, or when it becomes impossible to renew them again to repentance. Why do you think it is an unforgiveable sin to blaspheme the Holy Spirit? It's because if the Holy Spirit withdraws from a person they are truly finished - because they will never repent. Many Baptist preachers used to teach this, and I believed this long before I heard of Calvinism. I have been in services for years where the preacher warns us to not brush off any feeling of conviction, or delay coming to Christ because you don't have a promise that you can come at another time - because you won't want to.

That's fine but I would suggest that if you wish to stamp out Calvinism singlehandedly you should read Calvinists a lot more or you will be doomed to keep repeating the same objections over and over.

 

I can only speak for myself, I was born into A family where my older sister was Cerebral Palsy, basically brain dead.. a vegetive state, my mother consequently had nervous breakdowns followed by depressive states, the stress led to my fathers eminent collapse, his having a heart attack that killed him at 39 YO, which left us destitute. I consequently decided I had to provide for my family. I became a criminal. Would have gone further with it but for a midnight case with the cops where I jumped into a drainage ditch in the dead of winter to escape the pursuit. That frightened me cause if caught I was going to jail and I didn’t want that. Anyway I eventually got through college and was working, not making enough to support my mother, brother, sister and get married and so was going to step up to being a professional gangster blah blah. About that time my brother who was a very religious guy gave me a Christmas present… a 5 CD set of Max McLeans Classics of Christian Faith. In short, each CD hosted works of Christian men like Augustine, Luther, Bunyan, Edwards & Whitefield. It was to listen to them on my trips back and forth to college where I was taking extra courses. So I did listen to each and the first four CD’s didn’t do anything for me… didn’t make any difference. Then one snowy day driving home in the snow and being warned to slow down to 35 mph, I had a heightened awareness to my surroundings, to avoiding an accident and so I popped in the George Whitefield cd, ‘The Method of Grace’ and oleGeorge spoke some serious stuff to me and that message stays with me still… that sermon hit home. And because of it I was regenerated. Now conversion that’s a whole other story.

 

When have I said the Holy Spirit is not essential. All of the means that God provides are essential or God would not have provided them. You start with the false assumption that it is the deciding factor. The strange part is that then calvinists want to say man is responsible. That just shows how illogical the calvinist view is.
So why does that matter what RC calls irresistible grace. It is still an errant view of biblical salvation that he is promoting. He also says a man has to be saved before they can believe.

If man can not make an actual free will choice then it is not really free will. The determined free will of calvinism is an oxymoron. I seems that calvinists must hold to a certain level of cognitive dissonance to maintain they illogical view.

I must admit that I find it strange that you keep saying that when man does this or when he does that but at the same time you deny man has a free will with which to trust in God. Your stance is illogical. You are trying to walk both sides of the road at the same time.

Why do you think I am trying stamp out calvinism, they do that just fine on their own. The more you promote your view the more people see just how illogical it is and it dies out.

 

.... That is an awesome testimony. Thanks for posting that.

 

If it is not a deciding factor, then it is not essential. If I help you up the steps because you are disabled, but you would have eventually made it without my help then my help was not the decisive factor, even though it was a nice thing to do. (And it was not essential.) If you would not have made it except I assisted you then my help was the deciding factor, and was essential. Why can't you understand that concept?

Because he realized that irresistible is not the best term to use and it needs clarification. Words have meanings.

A man doing what he most wants to do is the closest a human can get to a free choice. Such a choice will always be due to multiple influences acting on us. That's part of being a mortal. What you are demanding as "free will" is a fantasy.

What is illogical and what would be the violation of a man's free will if God gives him over to run his sinful proclivities to their completion? God had every right to let Paul live out his days as a persecutor of Christians and then suffer for it. But instead he sovereignly pulled him up short. Paul said he was "apprehended" by Christ. Paul's free will was violated, Paul understood that, and was wisely thankful for it.

I'm ambivalent toward the labels myself and glad I'm in a church now where the pastor uses illustrations from Lewis, Sproul, and Lennox, without demanding that they first check off every single box of agreement with a certain camp. My only concern is that people like you lose out on a lot of good reading because of your prejudice, and fellowship too. And I admit that the Calvinist side dishes it out just as well.

 

When you start with the divine deterministic view then all talk of man responsibility goes out the window. If God determines all things then man has no option but to do as He has determined they do. Sin or good. What I see on this board and other's is that calvinist run away from the logical outcome of their theology and keep saying to those that point out their errors, well you just do not understand calvinism. We use your own words and you still claim that.

You are right words do have meaning and when calvinist claim divine determinism for God then that is what it means. When they write "God hath decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass " that does not leave much wiggle room does it. They then go on to claim that this does not cover "second causes" but how can these not fall under "all things" or did they actually mean to say, just some things, and got carried away in the moment. So you are right words do have meaning but the question is why do calvinist's not understand that and hold to it. The calvinist divine determinism calls into question all the arguments that calvinists make. It is logically inconsistent to say God has decreed all of man's free will choices but that is what calvinism expect us to accept.

You keep saying that man is responsible but not under your theology he is not. The Gospel call in calvinism is not a well meant or sincere offer. Only those that are included in the Unconditional Election will partake of the Limited Atonement and will be drawn to God by His Irresistible Grace. So all men do not have an equal chance to know or trust in God. Your own theology precludes this, but you it seems do not want to acknowledge that fact. When God determines the nature and the actions of men or as RC put even the movement of a molecule then for calvinists to claim man is responsible for anything is just to display sheer ignorance of their own theology.

Under biblical theology man has a real God given free will and God expects them to use it and holds them responsible for their choices. That is why He can be just when He allows man to run his sinful proclivities to their completion and hold them responsible for their choices. But under calvinism all those sinful proclivities have been determined by God so for Him to then judge man for doing what God determined for him to do would make God unjust. Which as you know God is not.

By disagreement with calvinism is not because of prejudice, it is because what I see in calvinism is a misuse of scripture. History shows that Augustine brought pagan philosophy into the church and Calvin just carried it forward and it has infected that strain of Christianity since then. The inspired word of God is to be our guide not the addition of errant philosophy.

I told you before that I do read a number of various authors but I do not use them inform me as to what the bible means. God gave us a book that anyone can understand but theologians have made it into a book that no one can understand.