After reading through the scriptures and tracing history yes. I only use the two terms now because I understand the difference. I will say that one I understood the distinction it didn’t take me long to correct my theology. But it was based upon scripture-not human logic of Augustine, Calvin or MacArthur.
BTW-the monergistic belief was always the historical Jewish belief as well so it always strikes me as odd that Christians would be the one to raise the issue of “free will”.
The fallacy is in thinking that one has to deny human freedom to resist God in order to uphold God's sovereignty. One does not, all the great theologians of the early Church insisted one does not, and so too did Augustine.
The fallacy I find is that people don’t rightly understand that they are slaves to sin and what precisely that means.
As for the rest of your statements, as Augustine rightfully states, “What do you have [sic including your ability to make choices] that you have not been given by God?”
If Augustine had taught that we cannot resist God's grace in any way whatsoever, then the arbitrium (choice) would not have been free choice but captive choice, captive to God. But even in the deepest anti-Pelagian writings, Augustine insists that God's grace can never be so understood as to eliminate free choice. He simply asserts this, again and again. Your monergism fails to make the distinction Augustine makes between arbitrium and voluntas. It ignores the wrinkle of complexity in his theology, a complexity he made central to his theology because he wished to avoid naked determinism, avoid making us ever be puppets either of the devil or of God.
You have fastened on St. Paul's "captivity to sin" language (and probably the potter's vessel language and the hardening of Pharoah's heart language) and assumed that it can only be understood one way--as denying human free choice, as requiring us to view humans, after the initial choice of Adam and Eve (perhaps after the initial choice of each individual to turn from God) as puppets of the devil or (for the elect of God) puppets of God.
Some people think the distinction between arbitrium and voluntas doesn't work: if the voluntas is captive to sin, captive always only to wrong choices, then how can he assert that something called free choice remains, if the choice (before saving grace) is always only a choice to sin?
Augustine gives a detailed exposition of how the voluntas can be captive to sin while the arbitrium remains free. You can reject it in favor of your monergism if you wish, but you cannot claim Augustine in support of your monergism. He explicitly rejects monergism in Letters 214 and 215 as well as in the early treatise On Free Choice.
You read the Hebrew Scriptures and see monergism. I don't. I see that sin clearly becomes habitual, that we become captive to sin and always choose wrongly without God's grace. But I also see God never treating the people of Israel as puppets, always demanding of them that they choose him ("Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" in Deuteronomy, for instance.) God assumes that people can truly choose him (only with his aid, with his grace, of course) and he therefore condemns to hell those who refuse him.
If you want puppetry monergism you are welcome to it. But it is not found in the Scriptures nor in the Church Fathers Greek or Latin nor in Augustine; it was condemned by the Church when it arose among the radical followers of Augustine, who Augustine himself rebuked for falsely understanding captivity to sin in the way you understand it. It disappeared from view for 1000 years in both Greek and Latin Christianity only to emerge with Luther and Calvin.
Follow it if you wish, see it in Scripture as you read Scripture, if you wish. The one Church Father who had to address the issue most explicitly because of the Pelagian controversy (the Greek Fathers didn't think Pelagius was such a great problem and condemned him only somewhat halfheartedly, perhaps having been spun by his disciples who were masters of propaganda--they had other fish to fry), Augustine, explicitly rebuked his own followers who read his writings in the way you are reading them. I don't know how it could be any more clear to anyone who does not come at it already believing in puppetry monergism.
And, yes, you will insist that you don't believe your monergism makes us into puppets of God. Fine, then explain exactly how any human freedom remains under your understanding of captivity to sin. I have explained how Augustine thinks he has preserved free choice while preservin the absolute priority of God's grace without making us into puppets. Explain how you keep from making us into puppets. Perhaps you will end up where Augustine does. If so, your monergism will have been unmasked as a subtle form of synergism. If you truly wish to insist on monergism, then I think you end up with puppetry. If you truly don't view us as puppets, then we have some form of genuine freedom despite our captivity to sin and that's all the Catholic Church at Orange II and Augustine and all the other big old bad non-Pelagian and non-Semi-Pelagian synergists ever said: a tiny bit of freedom remains but it is real freedom and we are not puppets. That is the Catholic teaching today, it is the common teaching of the entire Greek tradition, it was affirmed against Pelagius's much larger (monstrously large) affirmation of human freedom and his denial of captivity to sin and it was affirmed against the semi-Pelagians' more restricted but still heretical enlargement of human freedom.
Augustine is not a monergist, he does believe some human freedom remains (free choice) even while he equally stringently affirms our captivity to sin before grace and the absolute priority of grace in freeing us from captivity to sin. In this, Augustine does not depart from the common tradition of the Fathers. He affirmed at the same time (1) our real, deep, horrendous captiviity to sin, (2) our utter dependence on God's grace for salvation from that captivity, and (3) the survival of free choice despite both (1) and (2). This is exactly what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, what Orange II affirmed etc.
Since the Reformation, Protestants have falsely accused Catholics (and logically they should equally accuse Eastern Orthodox of the same thing) of denying one or both if (1) and (2) as they assert (3). What Calvin and Luther and apparently you do not grasp is that we believe we can affirm 1, 2, and 3 simultaneously and that this is what Paul teaches and the New Testament teaches. In response, we are told that if we affirm (3) we have to deny (1) and or (2). Who are you to tell us that we cannot hold all three in tension just because to your mnind they are contradictory? They are not necessarily contradictory to my mind, to Augustine's mind, to the Catholic and Orthodox mind.
That's the fallacy of Calvin and Luther and the unreconstructed Calvinists you seem to favor (Sproul, MacArthur, Horton etc.) they believe that if you affirm (3) you have to deny 1 and/or 2. There is a drive in Calvin and in this "monergistic/synergist" zero-sum game to insist on a logical dichotomy that Catholics and Orthodox and Augustine and Orange II did not insist on. The drive to resolve paradox to one side or the other begins with positing a dichotomy between monergism and synergism. One could, perhaps, mean by "monergism" something that could coexist with synergism and in that sense, Augustine or Catholics or Orthodox might even be willing to use the term.
You resolve the paradox to one side: you think that affirming human free choice means denying God's sovereignty, priority of grace. And you are not about to deny God's sovereignty or the absolute priority of God's grace, so you deny human free choice. Liberal Protestants (and liberal pseudo-Catholics, in other words, Pelagians and semi-Pelagians) resolve the paradox to the other side. They agree with you that if one affirms human free choice one has to deny God's sovereignty and the absolute priority fo God's grace. But they'd rather deny God's sovereignty than deny human free choice, so they end up opposite of you, but on the same basis: refusal to hold in tension what the Bible, the entire patristic tradition, both East and West, holds in tension: human freedom and God's freedom and sovereignty.
I'll take my stand with Augustine upholding both God's absolute (and I do mean ABSOLUTE) priority in extending the grace without which no one can be saved from captivity to sin and upholding with equal fervor the survival of human free choice even under captivity to sin because I do not believe that anything in the Scriptures supports the reduction of God's human creatures to unfree-puppets of either the Devil or of God.
And so, we are in a terrible state having sinned and rejected God. Our free choice only chooses wrongly. Without God's grace we could not do anything but continue in false choices and go to hell. But God's grace reaches out and heals our will (voluntas) which sets our free choice free of its captivity so that it truly does then choose God and rejets the Devil but only because God set it free from captivity. It's a slight difference--saying that the free choice remains free while being captive, but it's the difference between saying that,on the one hand, that a man held captive by an addiction becomes a mere puppet of the addiction and, on the other hand, saying that, while captive to the addiction, he retains the ability to choose and each time he gets drunk he chooses to get drunk and because he is captive to alcohol always only chooses to drink and cannot free himself of it by himself yet still it is he who is choosing each time he chooses to drink.
Notice what is at stake here. Ever since the discovery that alcoholism is a "disease" some have gone the monergistic puppet route: an alcoholic can't help it hence he is not to blame. Most of us conservative, traditionalists have felt uncomfortable with that. We recognize how captivating, how imprisoning addiction si but we refuse to view the alcoholic as merely a puppet and totally blameless. We recognize that he makes a choice each time, under the captivity of his addiction, he chooses to drink. We recognize that the AA program is correct in saying that he needs external help to break out of his addiction. He can no longer by himself choose not to drink. If he admits his captivity/addiction, he can be helped from the outside and slowly regain the ability to choose not to drink where once he chose always and only to drink. We do not say that he lost his choice while addicted but we do see that he used his choice only wrongly and needed external help to change this situation but that he himself was involved and made choices both while under and while not under his addiction. Indeed, as a recovering alcoholic (recovering sinner), one always will need external help (AA/God's grace) to choose rightly rather than wrongly, for the rest of one's life. But both under captivity to sin/addiction and when freed from that captivity, the person does choose. That's what the "synergy" of Catholicism teaches, that's what Orange II taught, that's what Augustine taught against those who insisted either that we are not at all captive (Pelagisns, semi-pelagians) or that we are not only captive but have lost even choice.
Now, you might say, I'll affirm that choice remains under addition/captivity to sin but it's no longer free choice. Augustine insisted that it was free choice but it was always freely exercised toward sin while under captivity. Why didn't Augustine conclude that captivity means there could be no free choice, only "choice." Because he never wanted to reduce the human being to a puppet of God or the devil because it would be a denial of human dignity. So he said, now look here: when you make a choice under great external pressure (fear for your life, for instance), you yourself do make the choice and in that sense it is a free choice. While under captivity to sin, we always only freely choose wrongly. The key here is that Augustine thought there could be a pattern of "always only" choices without those choices being "necessarily" so. It is a fact that we are captive to sin and that being captive to sin we always do choose wrongly and do not choose otherwise. He would even go so far as to say that we "cannot" choose otherwise than wrongly but the "can not" does not mean ontologicallly necessarily but that we "do not" do so because our "ableness" to choose otherwise has been addicted, imprisoned by sin.
These are fine distinctions. It's much easier to think of captivity to sin as "necessarily" can not choose rightly rather than "actually, factually do not and can not" choose rightly. The former is necessitarian determinism and was characteristic of all the ancient philosophic systems and Augustine knew it and opposed them with every fiber of his being because Christians had always fought against this temptation to give in to determinism.
You might say the distinction is so fine as to be meaningless. I think it makes all the difference in the world and so has the Church throughout the centuries. These distinctions are very hard to maintain. It's not accidental that determinism has come back to dominate our world in the form of Skinnerian behaviorism, Pavlovian conditioning, "poverty made him do it, it's not his fault," "his genes made him do it, it's not his fault" etc. Determinism over the course of known human history has always been the forerunner. Christianity and Judaism fought against it because there can be no place truly for love in a fatalistic, deterministic system. But fighting determinism can seem like a hopeless battle. In their zeal to avoid liberal Pelagian self-salvation, sadly, Luther and Calvin opted for the easy way out and threw in the towel in the struggle against determinism. That's the history of the monergism you find so readily in the Bible.
*Here is Augustine....
"For man's nature was creeated good by God, who is good; but it was made changeable by him who is changeless, since it was created from nothing. And so will in that nature can turn away from good to do evil - and this through its own free choice, and it can also turn from evil to do good - but this can only be done with the divine assistance."
Wisdom 11:25 For thou lovest all things that are, and hatest none of the things which thou hast made: for thou didst not appoint, or make any thing hating it.
1 Coe 7:37 For he that hath determined, being steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but having power of his own will: and hath judged this in his heart, to keep his virgin,doth well.
Philm. 14 But without thy counsel I would do nothing: that thy good deed might not be as it were of necessity, but voluntary.
Psalm 5 the morning I will stand before thee, and I will see: because thou art not a God that willest iniquity.
*You are clerarly confused when it comes to Church Fathers like Augustine. You are wrong about Scripture on the issue of free will(I couild have posted more) and you are following the heretical "reformers" personal and false opinions.
Repent while you still have time.