Saying it doesn't make it so.
Untrue. God chooses according to His good pleasure.
Not according to Calvin.
According to Calvin (and Augustine) there is no choosing. God is immutable. There is NO potentiality of any sort in God - period. Any talk of God's good pleasure is some sort of figure of speech and is only said so as to communicate something about God that our puny human minds can comprehend.
The last part is Calvinism, the other stuff you just imported your own faulty notion of Calvinism.
Saying it doesn't make it so.
Where you say ordain and predestine, you do not mean what the Calvinists mean by those words, they simply mean choice.
This was simple lie or you've been lied to and are simply repeating it. I do mean PRECISELY what Calvinists mean by them. (By "Calvinists" I mean educated Calvinists, not pew sitting Christians who don't think for more than an hour and a half a week about these issues.)
I have the quotes both from prominent Calvinists and from Calvin himself to prove what I've said, not to mention going on three decades of personal experience debating these exact issues with Calvinists. What have you got, your bald claim to the contrary?
I don't know what you think Calvinism is and I don't really care. I'm telling you that Calvinist theologians DO NOT believe that God actually chooses anything because if He did it would introduce potentialities in God which would mean He is mutable and thus wouldn't be perfect and thus wouldn't be God - a line of thinking straight out of Plato's writings, by the way.
God has the sovereign choice, He reserves the right to dictate what occurs in His creation, which is simply His property right, if you are so inclined. Him reserving His property right and exercising it is all that the cogent Calvinists think is going on, God requires no justification or defense for His choices and actions.
There isn't any such thing as a Calvinist that would agree with a syllable of any of this.
They do not believe that God has "rights" or that God even makes decisions in the way you are suggesting. Any such talk is considered an anthropomorphism at most.
And His activity to the cogent Calvinist involves influencing our decisions based on Him knowing who we are as people, combined with our circumstances that are beyond our control but not beyond His control.
This is laughably wrong! This is what open theists teach, not Calvinists! Calvin would flip over in his grave if anyone taught such a thing in his name. Calvinism's God does not influence, He determines, He does not help, He ordains, He does not wish, He commands.
When He makes something happen, it can be very passive on His part, if He were to simply permit someone with a certain nature or personality, to do what they deliberately intend to do.
Now this sort of comment I have heard Calvinist say but it's double talk. They do not mean what the words would mean in ANY other context because in Calvinism "what they deliberately intend to do" is precisely and only what God predestined them to intend. In the Calvinist system it isn't merely our actions that are predestined, it is everything we think, everything we feel, every intent of our heart, thought in our mind or deed of our hands has been immutably fixed by God's fiat command before time began!
“The devil, and the whole train of the ungodly, are in all directions, held in by the hand of God as with a bridle, so that they can neither conceive any mischief, nor plan what they have conceived, nor how muchsoever they may have planned, move a single finger to perpetrate, unless in so far as he permits, nay unless in so far as he commands, that they are not only bound by his fetters but are even forced to do him service” (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 17, Paragraph 11)
That quote is aimed at the evil doer but it applies equally to any action whether good or evil. Nothing happens, nothing whatsoever, that God did not command. And this is not some anomalous quote that was cherry picked from some obscure section of Calvin's writings. I've shown that quote to literally hundreds of Calvinists and not a single one of them deny believing it. Not a single solitary one! None of them even wanted to modify it, never mind deny it outright.
Not only that, but the doctrine flows inexorably from their theological foundations, including the doctrine of immutability and absolute sovereignty, indeed, that is THE Calvinist doctrine of absolute sovereignty.
NOT SO!!!
Physicists believe that the electron itself existence as probability wave function. The absolute polar opposite of the hard determinism that is Calvinist Cosmology.
What is an electron.
Nobody cares what Calvin said.
Look, we can have a substantive discussion about a rather complex topic if you want, or you can say stupidly unfounded nonsense like this and get made fun of and insulted.
Choose!
And no, God hasn't made the choice for you.
And I mean it in the meaningful way to you: no Calvinist cares what Calvin said.
Oh yes, they most certainly do.
Of late, they try to distance themselves from the man because he was a horrible despotic human being and because they cannot defend his doctrine rationally but it doesn't matter because everything they say they believe was written down by Calvin and they believe it because Calvin taught it, whether they know it or not. In other words, saying that they don't care what Calvin taught is just their attempt to have their cake and eat it too. It doesn't work. They believe Calvin's core beliefs and thus accepts his ancillary doctrines which follow logically from that core. Calling a turd a rose, doesn't make the stink go away.
Calvin sparked a movement, sort of like Darwin did, but neither Calvin nor Darwin speaks for the movement today.
Bull.
Calvin's writings are routinely read, taught and studied by every Calvinist student in any, (and by "any" I mean "EVERY") Calvinist seminary in existence all day every day.
Calvinists are beyond Calvin, they took the logic that Calvin proffered, and they've run with it. And the closest thing to a canon of Calvinism is the Westminster catechisms and statement of faith. And Westminster does not subject itself to Calvin's teaching authority either.
Name one currently accepted Calvinist distinctive doctrine that is not taught in Calvin's writings.
Which of the TULIP doctrines does any modern main stream Calvinist reject?
Which of the TULIP doctrines did Calvin not teach in one form or another?
Which of the divine attributes (Immutability, Impassibility, Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Absolute Sovereignty, etc) that Calvin taught do modern Calvinists reject or that have even been substantively altered away from what Calvin wrote?
This is literally what God said He did, in Isaiah for one example.
Blasphemy.
Do you understand what confirmation bias and paradigm blindness is?
We are categorically better. The Apostolic teaching, on divine providence finishes what Calvinist teaching, on divine sovereignty, sets out to do, but failed to accomplish.
Saying it doesn't make it so.
Failed appeal to authority. This is the logical fallacy of the invalid appeal to authority. There is no such man who's word alone establishes and sustains any charge made against Augustine, including such a statement as I emphasized above, that somehow anyone else would agree, who doesn't have an axe to grind (who isn't biased), that "Augustine moved back into pagan" anything.
Nonsense.
History is history. The fact is that Calvin got his doctrine from the same place that Luther did, namely the Classics (i.e. Plato) and Augustine who intentionally, purposely and gleefully imported the teaching of Aristotle and Plato (i.e. the so called Classics) into the Catholic Church. That IS where these ideas came from - period. You can stick your head in the sand if you want but facts are facts, history is history.
You'd have to demonstrate the whole field of PhD experts on Augustine basically uniformly believed the same thing, for this to be possibly a valid appeal to authority, but you haven't done that, you've only quoted a "PhD expert on Augustine".
No, you just missed the point. It isn't even a disputed point of history that Luther, AN AUGUSTINIAN MONK, left most of what the Catholic Church taught at the time concerning the attributes of God alone and that the Reformation was about removing the influence of Rome from the Christian faith but left the influence of pagan Greek philosophy fully intact. That most certainly includes the influence that Calvin had on the Reformation movement. Indeed, what Calvin did was to basically put in writing the Reformation doctrines which Luther had been teaching since he nailed that piece of paper to the church door. There's hardly a dimes worth of difference between what the two men believed in regards to the issues we are discussing.
This is a non-authoritative opinion, offered by a Noncatholic, of a Catholic bishop. Everybody's got opinions. Calling this guy an Oxford PhD and an expert on Augustine as if his opinion is weightier than anybody else's is, is a fallacy.
That's great, except that I didn't do any such thing. I couldn't really care less whether he's got a PhD or not. He is at least expert enough to have earned a PhD and published a book on the subject of Augustine which is far more credibility as an expert on the matter than you have.
And what he said was not opinion anyway. Take the first sentence - "Augustine was the only Christian bishop in history known to have been heavily influenced as a young man by participating in the three most highly deterministic systems that have ever existed—Gnostic Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism." The only portion of that sentence that could be construed as opinion is the designation of "the three
most highly deterministic systems". Someone might think that there some other system that was even more deterministic than those three but NO ONE could rationally defend the position that those three systems were not deterministic at all nor that Augustine is the only Christian bishop in history
known to have been heavily influenced as a young man by participating in those three systems.
In other words, his comments are matters of historical fact, not opinion. Augustine was either heavily influenced by them or he wasn't and there is no rational way to deny that he was! He absolutely was! There isn't a single dissenting voice from any theological historian anywhere in the world on that point.
Further, if you would like to present any evidence that what this man claims to be true is, in fact, false, then present the evidence. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less what you think about the guy who made the claims.
That has nothing do with Calvinism, red herring.
It has everything to do with it and your asinine claim that it's a red herring is proof positive that I was right when I said you don't know what you're talking about.
Calvinism IS reformed Augustinian doctrine. That's what it is whether you want to acknowledge it or not and Augustine came right out and stated as plain as day that he didn't care what argument was made, nor did he care what the bible seemed to teach, no explanation would do which would force him to believe that Aristotle was wrong about God being immutable. Immutability was Augustine's bed rock doctrine and it is as clear as it is possible to be that he learned that doctrine from Plato. When he was younger, he refused even to consider Christianity as a viable religious option precisely because the God of Genesis was mutable. That is THE reason that Augustine himself states is the reason he rejected his mother's faith. It wasn't until Bishop Ambrose taught him how to interpret the bible in light of the Classics that Augustine even considered becoming a Christian and the rest is history. History that is clearly documented and not the least bit disputed.
Clete
