It is not contradictory. It is true by experiential perception. If I am of the elect then God ordained me to come to Christ from the foundations of the world. And when that point came I asked Christ into my heart with a free will. No one forced me to pray the prayer. I experienced no force of any kind. For me it was absolutely real. What was unknown to me at the time was how much God was behind it. That does not subtract from my experience though. It was real to me. That is how both can be true at the same time.
Those who demand that man is autonomous and sovereign will disagree and say it doesn't count unless man moves wholly separately from God, but that's ridiculous. To them reality is DEFINED by man's autonomy. What a man knows and experiences only matters to the extent it is APART from God. This is not Biblical thinking, and clearly does not glorify God. It only builds man up at God's expense.
They rely on imagery like someone in chapel did at a Calvinist college I attended who said, "We clearly see free will and we clearly see God's predestination. Up close they are like railroad tracks that seem forever separate. But when we look off into the distance of eternity, we see they do come together." Man, that's just painful to see someone try to use that kind of intellectual emollient to soothe the dissonance caused by simultaneously holding mutually contradicting views of reality and human nature and then punting everything onto God:
Actually, I don't see that as a half-bad analogy at all. :) The rails represent God's and our perspectives and experiences. They are different, but both are real from the respective points of view. In glory they will eventually become one. Not in essence of course, but there will no longer be any difference between experienced realities.
We maintain that this counsel, as regards the elect, is founded on his free mercy, without any respect to human worth, while those whom he dooms to destruction are excluded from access to life by a just and blameless, but, at the same time, incomprehensible judgment" (Calvin, Inst. Book iii, chap. 21, sec. 7).
All this means is that we cannot know how or why God chooses some as His elect, and passes over others. We just know THAT He does it. If anyone agrees that God is sovereign, then what is wrong with that?
But in a completely determined universe, we cannot know anything, especially since every thought, and each chemical antecedent to those thoughts, lies in an unbroken chain of cause and effect ......
No, we can know what is given to us in God's revelation, we just can't know all there is to know. It is God's revelation that gives us the Calvinistic view.
But everything else, the freedom of will that true moral action requires, self-sacrifice, love, and even rebellion and the concept of punishment, is real, rather than just apparent.
Yes, it is real, depending on what one wants to consider as real.
Aren't you establishing here a relative (solipsistic) reality? What is real to me (oh, that me-me-me generation!) is real.
A little earlier in your post you state: "No one forced me to pray the prayer. I experienced no force of any kind. For me it was absolutely real. What was unknown to me at the time was how much God was behind it."
But, again, I ask you how do you "know" how much God is behind it, or if He is even behind it and what you "know" is "real" is not a product of one's imagination and, yes, even insanity?
Then you say: "Those who demand that man is autonomous and sovereign will disagree and say it doesn't count unless man moves wholly separately from God, but that's ridiculous. To them reality is DEFINED by man's autonomy..." but somehow you fail to see that you are defining your reality by the same thing you are criticizing.
We can only believe that God is real, that God exists, that God is good, that God resurrected, that believers are 'saved.' That's why it is called faith (hope), and not knowledge. Your side is committing the same error for which Gnosticism was rejected by Christianity: they claimed special "knowledge" and confused it with faith (hope). It is pure solipsism; what is real is that which is "real" to me.
It is not contradictory. It is true by experiential perception. If I am of the elect then God ordained me to come to Christ from the foundations of the world. And when that point came I asked Christ into my heart with a free will
So, you were pre-programmed to make a "free" will choice. My computer did the same thing this morning. So, you are essentially no different than a blade of grass, except that God endowed us with a delusion that we have free will? That's pure Calvinism, I have got to hand it to you. Nice religion.
***It is not contradictory. It is true by experiential perception. ***
Back to the Gnosticism? It is not apparent to others.
***If I am of the elect then God ordained me to come to Christ from the foundations of the world. And when that point came I asked Christ into my heart with a free will. ***
I thought that the Reformed view was that nobody could ask God to come into his heart because all men were made evil and unable to do so until the Holy Spirit made the change. Therefore something doesn’t fit. Either you can ask Christ to come into your heart with a free will (and the corollary to that is that you can decline to ask with the same free will), or that something is wrong with the Reformed view.