This is a long one! No time for editing! Please excuse typos!
That's true but what I am saying is that if I put up an opinion or quote by John Owen and someone won't accept that quote as coming from a true Calvinist then we have nothing further to discuss. And that seems to be true of you as well as some of the other "Calvinists" on this board. And if you notice, no Calvinists have joined in this discussion as of yet.
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 don't believe all those things, but do believe some, and God is immutable.
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 extreme predestination would have to include immutability, but if they are wrong it does not refute immutability, just extreme predestination.
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.
Thanks, but I hope you are not trying to say that you are an Arminian because you are not.
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 illustrates your problem, and that of some of the extreme predestinarians on here. There will always be paradoxes in theology or else the theology will be extreme and wrong in some areas.
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?
Calvinism, as I know it, and as the Puritans, Ryle, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and the rest preached it is clear that God is sovereign and yet man is responsible to respond to an actual and real offer of the gospel.
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.
The only way out of this is to go into a scenario where God really can not know what is going to happen next - or go the other way where everything is set, and the elect are justified from eternity.
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....