Isaiah40:28 said:
Well you might as well enlighten me as to where your views on election come from and where they take you.
My view of election, as you asked, cannot in anyway be properly communicated in a message board response. To reduce it in this manner is to give you, at best, a faint sketch that can only lead to wrong conclusions and misinterpretations. However, since few people here restrain themselves from such practices and happily jump to all kinds of unwarranted conclusions and convenient misinterpretations of the statements of others, why let that stop me, eh? So here is what I have to offer.
First let me make it clear to you and anyone else that I am not a Calvinist nor am I an Arminian. Calvinists believe in eternal security, so do I, but I am not a Calvinist. Arminians believe in the Holy Trinity, so do I, but I am not one of them. At best, for the sake of the topic I am a non-Calvinist (but once holding to the tenets of the 5 points of Calvinism). These labels, if one embraces them for their OWN identity, fine, but generally I believe they are used to diminish people’s arguments and their person and cast them in a very prejudicial light and often a distorted light not properly respecting or representing their theological views or appreciating distinctions and nuances, hence I avoid them and certainly don’t impose them on anyone else who states they are not ____ or _____ or whatever one might be tempted to call them. Respect for the position and self-labeling of a person must be observed or we, in our arrogance destroy the trust in debate and any reasonable dialogue.
To ignore the tension between the clear presence of human volition and Divine decree(s) in Scripture is foolish and that is something I am not interested in. And to assert one can fully and completely treat Divine decree(s) and human volition in a manner that harmonizes them and reconciles them so as to relieve all tension is naïve. Simply the mere presence of intense debate on the topics among sound teachers of Bible doctrine makes this conflict true.
What we can be sure of is that it is not a conflict with God but with ourselves and our fallen state (yes even as the redeemed we are experiencing limited capacities in these fallen bodies). God’s revelation is NOT inadequate, our capacity to conceptualize at the level of the Divine and capture the mechanics of the Divine are limited.
So my treatment is limited to noting and believing:
A. Election, in the context of salvation, refers to believers.
B. God’s integrity cannot be compromised; His offer of salvation to whosoever cannot and would not be made if election was to be understood as God choosing who would believe. A legitimate offer is one that can be fulfilled. Offering salvation to those God knows cannot (as opposed to will not, a great and critical distinction) receive it is based in deception, a lack of integrity, contrary to the essence of God.
C. God’s foreknowledge of those who will or will not believe is not the predicate of His plan. Foreknowledge is not the cause of election; rather it is a capacity or attribute of God that enables Him, according to His mentality (His determinations) to accomplish that which He determines.
D. Election is the expression of the Divine decree(s) of God in salvation.
There is your extremely limited sketch. I will be glad to pursue filling in the blanks, adding all the colors and maybe producing an adequate image through Q and A so long as we don’t color outside the lines, heh.
