I'm not doing much editing on this monstrosity. It's too long. No one is going to read it anyway.
And that would be because the alternative is to locate the basis for God’s choosing in man’s merit or man’s effort. Which is exactly what I said.
No it isn't! You implied that I took those quotes out of context! Implying that Calvin did not teach what those quotes made it seem like he taught!
As for why God would choose one person over another, why not believe what the bible says and understand that God chooses to save those who respond to Him in faith?
I'll tell you why, because you theology cannot survive that one single, incredibly simple idea!
That’s really the crux of Calvin’s argument. I find it amusing that you would continue to quote from authors who would, in no way, agree that God’s sovereign election is “arbitrary” and then accuse me of lying about what any of them said.
They all - all of them - including you believe that "God’s sovereign election" is “arbitrary”! You just got through admitting as much one sentence ago!
Very few, in fact only one that I've ever encountered, are willing to state it in those terms but as I've pointed out before, their unwillingness to do so is just so much double talk. At the end of the day, they believe and will affirm that God did not choose who to predestine to heaven or hell because of any reason other than that that's what He chose. He chose because He chose and that's it. There's no assigning any reason to His choice whatsoever.
Calvin didn’t think God’s election was arbitrary. Neither did Pink or Sproul. R. Scott Clark doesn’t, would you like me to confirm that? They all agree on some key concepts. Among them are the notion that God’s election is based solely on his own wisdom and counsel, and solely for His own glory. That’s for sure, and I agree with them. That’s not the same as “arbitrary.” In, fact, the only way God would escape your charge of being “arbitrary” would be not to “elect” at all.
Saying it doesn't make it so, dialogos!
I've got direct quotes and decades of experience. You've got claims and wishful thinking.
“We cannot assign any reason for his bestowing mercy on his people, but just as it so pleases him, neither can we have any reason for his reprobating others but his will.” (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 22, Paragraph 11)
It is time to be honest, Clete.
I see very little reason for you to continue to plug your quarters into the Calvinist quote machine as if anyone is impressed by your ability to use a search engine. If God's election is “personal” (meaning God chooses individuals for any reason) then God is being arbitrary in your view, isn’t He?
That's what the word "arbitrary" means but you imply an argument that I have not made. Once again, you are tacitly forcing a Calvinistic mindset into my brain that isn't there.
"God's election", in your meaning of the phrase, does not exist. God did not choose anyone before they existed.
You subscribe to the corporate predestination bucket theory. I’ve heard that analogy more than once. It goes like this…
“You see, it’s like God has a bucket called the “body of Christ…”
Nobody who ever read any of the passages in the Bible concerning predestination or election would get the “bucket theory” out of the text, you must import it into the text. The Bible explicitly says God predestines “individuals.”
You are delusional!
Proof?
Show me one passage where the Bible
explicitly says God predestines “individuals.”
It doesn't exist and you had to know that when you typed this and yet you post it anyway citing a verse that flat out does not
explicitly say that God predestines “individuals.”
Delusional!
God didn’t hand Jesus an empty bucket with a message written on it in sharpie that says, “the body of Christ.”
Jesus is crystal clear here, there are individuals who belong to Him and individuals who do not. Those who do will come to Him and those who don’t will not. I know you’ll try to dance like a ballerino around this passage but the word doesn’t change for your dancing.
You'd be funny if this were so astoundingly stupid.
The passage means what it says and doesn't contradict my doctrine in the least. I can no longer tell whether it’s just simple stupidity or a genuine mental disorder. Either way, I have no dancing to do.
You have direct quotes…that don’t claim God’s election is arbitrary.
Saying it doesn't make it so.
Calvinists and Arminians alike consider the open view to be heretical because it contradicts fundamental aspects of God’s character, namely, His Omniscience and in most cases, His Sovereignty.
Both of those doctrines are logically based upon the premise that God is immutable, which both Calvinists and Arminians affirm. Of the two, Calvinists are the more logically consistent but the incarnation, the very gospel itself, defeats them both in one stroke.
You mean, he will tell me that Numbers 23:19, Psalm 102:25-28, Malachi 3:6 and Isaiah 46:10 are all true and not in contradiction to the passages where God condescends to reveal His ability to be impassioned?
Among other things, yes. He’ll pull out every proof text that Calvinist typically use and then if you argue too loudly for too long, he will remove you.
I understand that some Calvinists do. And I would agree with them wholeheartedly on the question of God’s immutability. Depending on how one defines “impassibility” I might find some disagreement with the fine folks at CRTA and would certainly disagree with you on your own understanding of impassibility.
It isn’t “my understanding”. The word means what it means and Calvinist intend it to mean its normal definition. They do not believe that God’s state of mind can change. It’s just stupidity for you to even be challenging that! They flat out believe that and if you don’t, I’m here to tell you that you have taken the first step in a direction that will lead you to drop the entire system!
The whole thing from top to bottom is based on God’s utter and absolute immutability as defined and argued by PLATO!!! Any wiggle room you give, whether it be in regards to God’s state of mind or not, implies, in the mind’s of consistent Calvinists, that God is imperfect in whatever area you allowed the wiggle room to exist because, in the mind’s, any alteration of the perfect must be an alteration for the worse, which God cannot be forced to permit and would not be willing to allow.
I’ve heard this argument before and it issues from a false premise. Namely, that if Plato said it, it must be wrong since Plato was a pagan and all. Apply the same standard to your own theology and the Open View takes a tumble as well. The pagan deities were constantly changing their minds and they moved through time with humanity. They were constantly learning, changing and sometimes surprised by the antics of humanity. Just read the Odyssey and see how Zeus interacts with Odysseus. If Calvinism falls for its similarity with Plato’s view of immutability then the Open View fails for its similarity with the Greek mythology.
I have made no such argument!
Good grief you Calvinists can’t follow even the simplest of reasoning.
First of all, the Calvinist doctrine is not “similar” to Plato’s immutability, it is identical to it! More importantly, I do not, nor does any Open Theist, argue that immutability is wrong because Plato believed it. Plato believe a lot of things that were entirely true! Plato believed that god exists. Plato believed that water was wet and that the sky is blue and that people are born and die and ten thousand other things that were and are entirely true!
So, the argument isn’t that immutability is false because Plato believed it. We simply are pointing out, quite correctly, that the origin of the doctrine is not the bible but rather Aristotle and Plato. Calvinists are huge on the idea of sola scriptura and so the historically demonstrable fact that this doctrine originated with Greek paganism, aught to cause them to rethink the doctrine and reexamine whether there is any biblical basis for it but they do not. They cannot read even the first page of the book of John without Plato’s ideas being crushed into powder and yet they persist, not only in believing the doctrine, but also in reciting Plato’s own arguments (verbatim) in defense of it.
These arguments from analogy aside, it simply doesn’t matter what the pagan Greeks said, it matters what the word of God says.
YOU!
YES YOU!!!
Made PLATO’S exact argument on this very thread! You brought it up before I did!
The bible doesn’t say that the perfect cannot change, Plato said that!
And the Bible describes our God Who is perfect in all of His ways and does not change in His nature, goodness, being, power holiness, justice or truth.
This is one sentence with which I completely agree! (Depending on just what you mean by the word “nature”).
It also says that God experiences emotions and it is clear that sometimes the Word uses anthropomorphic language to describe God’s disposition.
The consistent Calvinist assumes that any passage that discusses God becoming anything is a figure of speech. Whether it’s becoming angry or becoming flesh. The text doesn’t mean that God actually became anything, there’s just no other way for the text to describe what happened that our puny little human mind’s can understand.
And the only reason – THE ONLY REASON - that they jump through such convoluted intellectual hoops is to preserve the idea that the perfect cannot change in any way whatsoever just as Plato argued 300 years before God the Son BECAME the Son of Man.
There is really no need to pit those verses against the other, clear, verses of scripture that speak of God’s perfect, unchanging nature, His unchanging character, and His unswerving plan and purpose.
God Himself states that His plans change and that if He says He’ll do something to or for some person or group but then that person or group either does evil or repents of evil then He will repent and not do that which He said He would do. There is at least one whole book of the bible dedicated to one specific instance of God doing exactly that which states explicitly that God did not do that which He thought to do.
Jonah 3:10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.
Jeremiah 18:8 if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will repent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it.
In Isaiah we read about God expecting one thing and getting another…
5 Now let me sing to my Well-beloved
A song of my Beloved regarding His vineyard:
My Well-beloved has a vineyard
On a very fruitful hill.
2 He dug it up and cleared out its stones,
And planted it with the choicest vine.
He built a tower in its midst,
And also made a winepress in it;
So He expected it to bring forth good grapes,
But it brought forth wild grapes.
3 “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah,
Judge, please, between Me and My vineyard.
4 What more could have been done to My vineyard
That I have not done in it?
Why then, when I expected it to bring forth good grapes,
Did it bring forth wild grapes?
Reasoning from the scriptures is the only kind of reasoning with which I am concerned.
I have no doubt that you believe this to be the case but it isn’t so.
You’d not be a Calvinist at all if it were true. Although, based on what you’ve said in this thread, I’d say you’re a lot closer to not being a Calvinist than you think you are.
God clearly experiences emotion and also, clearly, does not change in His nature, character, goodness, plan or purpose. That stance may not be Calvinist enough for you… I don’t care.
Well, you should care. Not because of me but because one aught to desire to have a logically consistent theological worldview.
I’m not just being snide when I say that you don’t get to pick and choose. I mean, you could just pick and choose if you decided you wanted to but then why bother debating it? If you’re going to just cherry pick what you’re doctrines are then what are you doing on a debate forum and on what basis would you believe you have grounds to find fault with anyone else’s cherry picking?
The point here is that it matters! It matters a lot! Ideas have consequences and neither of our personal opinions have anything to do with it.
Quite to the contrary. I was saved in an Acts 2 dispy Arminian church. I spent some time studying from a mid-acts dispy church pastor. I come by my commitment to the 5 points not by being instructed to embrace them but by my observations that you can’t escape the sovereign election of God in the Bible. I got tired of doing the parkour version of exegesis where I jumped and flipped around certain passages rather than just accept what they said.
Passages like John 6 and Romans 8 are ones I'm speaking of, passages which you have already demonstrated a remarkable facility to avoid the obvious conclusions.
You can bandy about your philosophy all day to your heart’s content but when you open the word you find the notion inescapable.
You forget that this isn’t my first trip around this particular barn.
There isn’t one syllable of Calvinism’s distinctive doctrines in the bible. You cannot see them there unless and until you bring them with you to the text in an a priori fashion. This is the way Ambrose taught Augustine to do it and that’s the way everyone has done it ever since, including you.
Not that I doubt you grew up in a half way descent church, I’m sure you did but you believe Calvinism because someone taught it to you.
Now, regarding my comment on Dahmer you said:
Of course not. But whether you like it, or you don’t, there is not a Christian theological framework that does not, in the end, claim that all that happens is either part of God’s active or permissive will.
This is flatly false and down right blasphemous! Not everyone thinks like a Calvinist, dialogos!
I could prevent my daughter from ever getting a speeding ticket by making it impossible for her to drive. Does that make her speeding part of my “permissive” will?
Of course not!
The entire concept of “permissive will” is a giant fallacy anyway. At the very least it’s probably the most flagrant category error in the history of philosophy and that’s if you’re not a Calvinist and buy into this idiotic notion. If you’re a Calvinist, it’s far worse. God’s “permissive will” vs. His “perfect will” is either a distinction without a difference in which every item in one is also in the other or else the Calvinist is forced to admit that God’s will is compartmentalized with one section that is imperfect by definition, which destroys the entire Calvinist construct.
Which is it for you?
Everyone, to some extent, is a determinist. Either God:
1. Determines that it will happen beforehand, or
2. knows that it will happen beforehand and determines to allow it, or
3. knows, beforehand, that it could happen and is determined not to do anything to preclude the possibility, or at the very least..
4. sees it happening and determines in the moment to do nothing to stop it despite being fully capable of so doing.
You are not a Christian. That is to say that there is no way that you could possibly be saved. You believe God is unjust. You believe that you are smarter than God! Worse than that, you believe that you are wiser than God! You DO believe that! You don’t like the sound of it so you choose, yes I said you CHOOSE, to believe that since your sensibilities and your great wisdom has decided that you can’t live with a God who choose to allow evil to persist, that He therefore determined in advance that it would happen.
You disgust me!
There are certainly permutations of all four of these but you get the idea. Even the open view must confess that God “determines” all that occurs.
Fool!
When your argument, like a boomerang, comes right back around and knocks you in the head, you know it’s a faulty argument.
You are arguing against yourself!
Not everyone thinks like a Calvinistic fool that thinks they’ve outsmarted their Creator.
Where do you get this stuff?
I quoted you own words!
There was a typo in there though that I later fixed but not before you started typing your response to my post.
What you read and responded to was:
“So, according to you, the mind of God is separate from the mind of God;...“
What I intended to say was:
“So, according to you, the mind of God is separate from the
heart of God; ...“
The rest of what I said made it clear what I meant but still, the typo deserves to be pointed out.
I’m going to just ignore most of the blasphemy you spout in defense against the plain reading of not just scripture but God’s very own words. Suffice it to say that God Himself with His own words through the profit Jeremiah said, “I did not command them, nor did it come into My mind that they should do this abomination”. In fact, the point is made twice! Once in Jeremiah 18 and then again in Jeremiah 32.
You can play around all you like but that isn’t just a righteous person telling someone that God didn’t command it. No! Those are GOD’S OWN WORDS that He spoke Himself!
Do you suppose that He was lying?
My argument is that there are, at the very least, things that man does that God does not desire but nevertheless determines to permit.
And once again, God’s heart is separate from His mind. Or put in terms that you’ll get; God’s “perfect will” is separate from His “permissive will” and He therefore predestined things that were contrary to His perfect will.
Your brain is so self-conflicted, how are your eyes not crossed?
My argument is in contrast to yours.
Is in conflict with scripture blasphemous.
Let’s talk about predestination, shall we?
No. I’d rather not, actually.
I won’t be typing up another one of these marathon posts. It isn’t worth my time to spend three days typing one post. It would have been more had I not just blown off the rest.
