Posted on 09/30/2004 4:49:07 AM PDT by HarleyD
Can't speak to the whole of Calvinist-claiming denominations, but in an article titled It Is A Terrible Faith, the Reformed Church in America claims this:
"this is the faith which has caused the Reformed Church in America to become one of the great missionary churches of all time. If you are conversant with the history of foreign missions, you know that, of course. You know that there are few churches, few denominations, which have sent forth so many to the mission fields of the world in proportion to their membership."
Is God's grace unmerited? Absolutely! But the question isn't whether we merit God's gift (a gift, by definition, is not something that is owed), but whether God is caprecious and whether we have moral responsibility.
If God is not capricious, then He offers this gift to the whole world, as He repeatedly affirms throughout the Scripture. And if we have moral responsibility, then we have the free will to accept His gift of salvation or to turn it down--and many choose to turn it down. There is nothing irresistable about grace: As Stephen said in Acts 7, there are some who always resist the Holy Spirit.
God of course is outside of time and foreknows who will accept this gift. If He did not, then some who would receive His gift and His love would by simple chance and circumstance, from the accident of their birth and geography, never know it, and God does not desire that any should perish, but that all would receive eternal life. He also foreknows who will never accept Him through His Son, but it's not like He capreciously prevents those who would accept His gift from doing so, overriding the free will that He gave them and treating them as toys and puppets. That is not the God of the Bible, but the Allah of Mohammed!
So His election comes after their choosing? Isn't that a bit like sending in your absentee ballot on December 2nd? And the "elect" chose out of free will, so there was no predestination (before the foundation of the world) involved, contrary to Romans 8?
Please read ahead one more chapter to Romans 9, and explain the potter analogies in the light of your foreknowledge-first-then-election claim.
What I said was that God's sovereign decisions were made based on His foreknowledge, as affirmed in the Bible, not based on some kind of whim. No sovereign, if he is worthy of love and respect, makes his decisions on the flip of a coin, but bases them on his knowledge.
Secondly, you completely miss the point of Romans 9-11 if you think Paul is talking about individual election. Paul is upholding that the nation of Israel (the physical nation, not "spiritual Israel" if you insist on the use of that term) is the elect nation of God--and indeed, if you look up and read Paul's OT allusions in their original context, it is clear that the fate of nations, not individuals, is the subject of each. God has sovereignly decided to set Israel apart from all other nations as His own. Furthermore, Paul goes on to show that the Church has no reason to be proud over Israel, though they had fallen and had many of their branches broken off, and he affirms that God would remove Israel's spiritual blindness and save the whole nation "when the fullness of the Gentiles have come in," as was proclaimed by the prophets of old.
Calvin's extreme predestination is based not on solid Biblical teaching, but on a flawed exegesis that starts with replacement theology, and then has to find some way to reconcile that theology with God's election of Israel in Romans 9-11. Thus, Calvinists hijack God's promises for Israel and twist them into a system that elevates God's sovereignty (which is not in question) over His love and His covenants.
But Protestants rejected this approach. The Reformation was to go BACK to the original interpretations of the scriptures. If the church traditionally said the "blue view" was right and condemned as heresy the "red view", why would the "red view" now be correct?
Some just don't know what the historical teachings were. Others completely reject the historical teachings in favor of 18th century teachings no matter if it was built on heresy. When confronted with the historical context of scripture, it's difficult for me to understand why people would favor a heretical interpretation over a historical interpretation no matter how unappealing it may seem.
So that there's no misunderstanding, which view are you claiming did not arise until the 18th Century?
Thank you on both counts HarleyD.
The Anabaptist site which led me to others. And to rediscovering mostly forgotten history. Don't know if you noticed the mention of the book Martyrs Mirror. Fascinating text of first hand accounts, if you can find an english version-usually in german.
I'll have to look into the other further. It just doesn't make sense doctrinally speaking.
Again, thank you for thinking of me.
PS If you are political at all, I hope you will look in on an article I am about ot post called, Bad Company.
Arminius (whose name has been much-maligned by the Calvinists--and indeed by many so-called "open theology" Arminians who didn't know squat of what the man himself wrote) was more or less a contemporary of Calvin IIRC, so I don't see how one view or the other can claim to be the "traditional" view of the Church on that basis. While teachers and traditions can be good in expanding our knowledge of God's Word, they should always be but a starting point, never the end of our convictions and knowledge.
Ever hear of Campus Crusade for Christ? Bill Bright, its founder, was Presbyterian.
Ever hear of Evangalism Explosion? D. James Kennedy, its founder, is Presbyterian.
Ever hear of the Jesus film? Financed by a presbyterian, and distributed by Campus Crusade.
Like you are a contemporary of Herbert Hoover?
Arminius 1560 - 1609
John Calvin 1509 - 1564 "Institutes" first published 1536.
The Council of Orange (520+AD) sat down the beliefs of the church which was the Augustine (Calvinist) view. Arminius molded his beliefs from Semi-Peligius which molded their beliefs from Peligius which was condemned by the church as heresy.
You complain about Calvin so you might as well complain about Augustine as well which is what a number of Arminian website proudly proclaim. The fact of the matter is that they're supporting heresy. You just have to do a little bit of digging if you are REALLY interested in knowing the truth.
Do you think God knew who would receive Christ prior to creating the universe, before space/time, before the first molecule?
Assuming you answer the former question "yes"...
Why do you think God went ahead and created those whom He (fore)knew would not receive Christ anyway?
In answer to the second question: Had God only created those that would come to Him, that in and of itself would belie free will, since only those "preprogrammed" to accept Him would exist.
An illustration may help: Say that you set up a simulation program to play with the free will of AI. You create x number of entities within the program and give them differing gifts which when combined with their own choices, grow into rudimentary personalities. Now lets say that you ran the program forward in time to see which AIs would travel to the right side of the screen and which to the left. Now lets say that you reversed the clock and simply deleted all of the AIs who would go to the left.
Assuming that the AIs that originally turned to the right still did in the absence of those who went to the left (and that's problematic, since none of us make our decisions in a vacuum), would those that went to the right still have a real choice?
Free will is only meaningful if some can choose differently than others! And love, by it's very nature, cannot exist unless there be free will to choose not to love! Don't believe me? Go get one of those dolls that says, "I love you," when you pull on the string and tell me how satisfying that is compared to the genuine love of your family and friends.
The real question is not why a God who gave us free will and respects it would allow those who exercise that free will to rebel to exist in the first place. He does so because He loves them enough to let them decide whether to submit to His wooing. The real question is why the God of John Calvin and Augustine (both of whom, it should be pointed out, advocated using the State to force people to convert) is such a puppet-master that He would create beings and force them to rebel against Him, and such a sadist that he takes those helpless, morally-unresponsble beings and damns them to hell! As Dave Hunt asks in his book of the same title: What Love Is This?
Shades of Abraham Kuyper on common grace.
Mullins did not seem to realize that his mediating pragmatism was an inherently unstable basis for religious authority and that it pointed toward theological relativism, since personal experience is diverse by its very nature. (Your experiences of life are different than mine, but we both have God as our point of contact.)
Herein we see the fundamental snare of subjectivism: We lose our absoulte point of reference, our North Star. We sail willy-nilly through the murky waters of evolution, are tossed by the stormy seas of higher criticism. I cannot but see parallel effects of experience-over-doctrine in the revivalism:
One leader of the Welsh revival received a vision of ''unprecedented excitement'' which is described as follows: ''His spiritual perception had been considerably developed and he could not fail to draw inspiration and motivation from those supernatural, extrabiblical (notice the terminology, HH) revelations. There was no question in my mind as to their authenticity or authority" (Evans, op. cit., p.191). The result of that kind of an experience is one in which one withdraws, as it were, into direct union and fellowship with God and which gives to one a rapturous joy and an other-worldly peace and tranquillity of heart.This experience brings one into such close union with God and experience of fellowship with Him that it defies human description. It is a wholly emotional and completely ethereal absorption into mystical union with God Himself, and it has resulted in a kind of revival in the church which manifested itself in a new zeal for the cause of God and a new zeal for missions and for the conversion of souls, and has brought the church to a state of spiritual strength such as she had not known in all of her existence.
This is what is meant by revival. When you hear prayers for revival, when you hear people speak of the need of revival, this is what is meant. This is the unusual work of the Holy Spirit which characterizes revivals.
This is what revivalism is all about. I know that there have been those who have warned of the excesses of revivalism. Jonathan Edwards himself wrote a book in which he specifically condemned the excesses that were present in the New England revivals. And Samuel Miller, the old Southern Presbyterian Calvinist, himself an ardent defender of revivals, delivered an extraordinarily lengthy speech warning against its dangers. Nevertheless, this is what characterizes revivals. These are the unusual outpourings of the Spirit. Those who engage in such things have made a return to Roman Catholic mysticism. (See also Charles Hodge's book: The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church.)
That kind of revival is what men seek for today as the cure of the church's ills. That kind of revival is inimical to the Reformed faith, is something that must be condemned by every believer who loves the truth of the Scriptures.
<snip>
[Mysticism] manifests itself in two ways.
It manifests itself first of all in a carelessness or indifference towards doctrine, even to the point where it considers doctrine a detriment to true spiritual life. Consider, for example, this quote which is taken from the book of Ian R.K. Paisley. He writes about someone involved in a revival who was asked concerning whether or not he was a Calvinist. This is his answer:
I would not wish to be more or less a Calvinist than our Lord and His apostles. But I do not care to talk on mere points of doctrine. I would rather speak of the experience of salvation in the soul (The '59 Revival, Valiant Press, London).Source: Ought the Church to Pray for Revival? Prof. Herman Hanko, Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary.
At the end of the day, what exactly is the proper role of experience in the Christian life? Are revivalistic experiences - what is interpreted as an unusual outpouring of God's Spirit as described - truly of God?
Hope this is not too off-topic, apologies if so. It reflects an issue of personal import that I am wrestling.
Astute observation Becky. The health of the congregation is too often gauged by the fullness of the parking lot on Wednesday evening and not by the diet being served up inside. Numbers, programs, money.
Spot on.
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