Posted on 06/19/2009 7:09:41 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
For the non-Calvinists or anti-Calvinists among us who may worry that this issue of WORLD has several articles about John Calvin, be not afraid: It happens only once every 500 years. July 10 brings the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth—and the great theologian, even with his warts, deserves a better press than he has typically received in recent decades.
Calvin was a fallen sinner, as all of us are, but was he especially mean-spirited? He taught that God created the world out of love and loved the world so much that Christ came down from the glorious kingdom of heaven and plunged into this world's muck. Calvin saw God as a generous giver and His mercy as an abundant resource. Jehovah's Witnesses would later insist that heaven has room for only 144,000, but Calvin understood that God's grace is infinite.
Did Calvin emphasize in-group harshness toward the poor and the alien? No: He wrote, "We cannot but behold our own face as it were in a glass in the person that is poor and despised . . . though he were the furthest stranger in the world. Let a Moor or a barbarian come among us, and yet inasmuch as he is a man, he brings with him a looking glass wherein we may see that he is our brother and neighbor." Everyone is created in God's image and worthy of respect.
Did Calvin want us to abstain from all material pleasures? He wrote that God "meant not only to provide for necessity but also for delight and good cheer. . . . Has the Lord clothed the flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils, and yet will it be unlawful for our eyes to be affected by that beauty, or our sense of smell by the sweetness of that odor?" He opposed any doctrine that "deprives us of the lawful fruit of God's beneficence."
Calvin also opposed doctrines that deprive us of political liberty. His understandings—that God-given laws are superior to those of the state, the king, and any other institution, and that individuals have direct access to the Bible, without dependence on pope or priest—are common now, but compare them to the political and theological theories fashionable before his time. In ancient times, pagan states revered leaders as semi-divine. Those who argued with such bosses were seen as deserving death. In medieval times, the interpretations of church officials often trumped the words of the Bible itself (which few people could read). They identified God's kingdom on earth with a church monopoly, and hanged, burned, or decapitated some with other ideas.
Calvin and other Reformation leaders, though, separated church and state while emphasizing the importance of believers working to lead the state. Calvin contended that, since God reigns everywhere, His followers should be entrepreneurs in every strategic institution, including government, civil society, commerce, media, law, education, the church, and the arts. This emphasis led directly to what has become known as the "Protestant ethic," with its unleashing of individual initiative and its emphasis on hard work in purportedly secular areas. Many kinds of labor are equally worthy, Calvin argued, and those in charge of one activity should not dictate to others.
Calvin's writings also had an implicit anti-statism. Since fundamental law comes from God, obeying the law means obeying God, not necessarily the state. Rebellion against an unlawful state act, led by "lesser magistrates" such as local leaders, is really a justifiable maintenance of true law. One Calvin disciple in 1579 wrote Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos ("Vindication Against Tyrants"), which emphasized the limits of power.
Would freedom ring? The English jurist Blackstone called "the power and jurisdiction of Parliament transcendent and absolute . . . sovereign and uncontrollable." English lawyers joked that "Parliament can do everything except make a woman a man, or a man a woman." (Some of our jurists and legislators are more ambitious.) But generation after generation of Calvinists read Vindiciae and emphasized that government must be under God. According to John Adams, its doctrines greatly influenced Americans of the 1760s and 1770s.
Calvin's birthday comes six days after the Independence Day that owes much to his teaching. Bake a cake and know that Calvin was not against enjoying it.
Cordially,
Muslims don't know Jesus Christ and the Gospel. They haven't been presented it.
When a person loves unconditionally,They have Christ abiding within them
Your post reveals the pathetic emptiness of Rome's desire to elevate "natural law" to the same position as the Gospel.
Scripture tells us Jesus Christ is the truth and the way. God can certainly do what He wants, but He has told us of His ordained path to heaven - and it's not simply to "love unconditionally." It's to love the truth of Christ risen.
According to you, if a man loves his schnauzer "unconditionally," he's "got Christ abiding within him."
The only foolish people who believe that are Rome and PETA.
Even the natural law is subject to the curse of Adam. There is no neutrality in this life. There are only believers and disbelievers, by the predestining will and purpose of the Triune God.
"For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive?" -- 1 Corinthians 4:7
That's not the Almighty God of the Bible you're describing, that's Jean Cauvin's little pocket deity, dark and sadistic (in Cauvin's own image).
Ping to post 42.
"For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy." -- Romans 9:15-16
That doesn’t say anything about creating souls specifically so that they be damned to hell, and there is a reason for that: the Almighty God of Scripture does not do that.
Only the evil, sadistic little pocket deity of Jean Cauvin does that.
God brings men to Him by free, unmerited grace. If He so chooses to bring to Himself men who are mentally retarded then He does that the exact same way -- by free, unmerited grace.
Love is all that matters. When are you going to UNDERSTAND that,my dear brother?
Are we instructed to hate sin?
Are all men created by God and all men under the curse of Adam?
The question is irrelevant.
lol. And this is why that book is not part of the inspired word of God. The book of Wisdom, along with the other books of the Apocrypha, so obviously contradict God's word found in both Testaments.
Let's see what verse 27 of "Wisdom" 11 says...
"But thou sparest all: because they are thine, O Lord, who lovest souls." -- Widsom 11:27
Does this seem accurate to you? God "spares all?"
Are all men created by God and all men under the curse of Adam? Are all men fallen and deserving of damnation due to the sin of our first father?
For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come." -- Romans 5:12-14"Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
There's the answer, unless you want to deny Paul...again.
The question is irrelevant to my previous point, and your answer is wrong.
Why do you hide them?
All of whom?
Do you even know to whom the verse refers?
Nonsense ,dear sister. I have said to you many times that God created everything in one NOW,thus,God does not think in succession or God would change.Lucifer fell from heaven and became prideful by his own free will ALL in one NOW to God
I will post this again,I suggest you read it carefully
By Saint Thomas Aquinas....
When it is said, ‘God knows, or knew, this coming event,’ an intervening medium is supposed between the divine knowledge and the thing known, to wit, the time to which the utterance points, in respect to which that which is said to be known by God is in the future. But really it is not in the future in respect of the divine knowledge, which existing in the instant of eternity is present to all things. In respect of such knowledge, if we set aside the time of speaking, it is impossible to say that so-and-so is known as non-existent; and the question never arises as to whether the thing possibly may never occur. As thus known, it should be said to be seen by God as already present in its existence. Under this aspect, the question of the possibility of the thing never coming to be can no longer be raised: what already is, in respect of that present instant cannot but be. The fallacy then arises from this, that the time at which we speak, when we say ‘God knows,’ co-exists with eternity; or again the last time that is marked when we say ‘God knew’; and thus a relation of time, past or present, to future is attributed to eternity, which attribution does not hold; and thus we have fallacia accidentis.*
Since everything is known by God as seen by Him in the present, the necessity of that being true which God knows is like the necessity of Socrates's sitting from the fact of his being seen seated. This is not necessary absolutely, ‘by necessity of the consequent,’ as the phrase is, but conditionally, or ‘by necessity of the consequence.’ For this conditional proposition is necessary: ‘He is sitting, if he is seen seated.’ Change the conditional proposition into a categorical of this form: ‘What is seen sitting, is necessarily seated’: it is clear that the proposition is true as a phrase, where its elements are taken together (compositam), but false as a fact, when its elements are separated (divisam).* All these objections against the divine knowledge of contingent facts are fallacia compositionis et divisionis.
That God knows future contingencies is shown also by the authority of Holy Scripture: for it is said of Divine Wisdom, It knows signs and portents beforehand, and the issues of times and ages (Wisd. viii, 8): and, There is nothing hidden from his eyes: from age to age he regardeth (Ecclus xxxix, 24, 25).
*Note
Fallacia accidentis is when an irrelevant accident is introduced into the conclusion, as, ‘You ate what you bought: but you bought raw fish.’ Time is in irrelevant accident to the divine knowledge.
NOW read this to understand that God DOES NOT will evil
EVERY act of God is an act of virtue, since His virtue is His essence (Chap. XCII).
2. The will cannot will evil except by some error coming to be in the reason, at least in the matter of the particular choice there and then made. For as the object of the will is good, apprehended as such, the will cannot tend to evil unless evil be somehow proposed to it as good; and that cannot be without error.* But in the divine cognition there can be no error (Chap. LXI). 3. God is the sovereign good, admitting no intermixture of evil.4. Evil cannot befall the will except by its being turned away from its end. But the divine will cannot be turned away from its end, being unable to will except by willing itself . It cannot therefore will evil; and thus free will in it is naturally established in good. This is the meaning of the texts: God is faithful and without iniquity (Deut. xxxii, 4); Thine eyes are clean, O Lord, and thou canst not look upon iniquity (Hab. i, 13).
ALL unconditional love is Christ abiding in us,thus ,ANY person who loves has Christ abiding in them
"7 Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for charity is of God. And every one that loveth, is born of God, and knoweth God. 8 He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is charity." 1 John 7-8
Did you NOTICE that the scripture says EVERY ONE who loves?
***OF GOD’S ETERNAL DECREE
Chapter III
I. God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass;[1] yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin,[2] nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.[3]
II. Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions;[4] yet has He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.[5]
III. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels[6] are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death.[7]***
Hello, Dr. E. Still peddling your papers?
I see that you have finally posted that the Reformed God creates people to go to hell for His own pleasure. I’ve been posting this to you for a long time and you keep denying it. Wonderful. I see that you have slunk away from the last thread. Were you possibly repulsed by the Gospel and Pauline and Petrine verses I kept posting to you? At any rate:
***God is all holy; He “is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
And yet we have the fact that Satan is a created being, created by God who, like all creation, is under the firm control of the Triune God.***
Not Christian. Let’s put an X under the non Christian on this entry on the census.
*** Can any alternatives make sense Scripturally or logically or spiritually? ***
Only the Catechism of Christ, not the Catechism of the English Parliament. Or didn’t you know that the king of England commissioned, bought and paid for the Westminster Confession? The Vatican is a foreign country, but founded on Christ. England? Well?
***We fight against a creature of God’s own eternal purpose and design.***
The Christian does not believe that God is evil. God cannot be evil. He is of unlimited love and unsurpassed compassion. He is not evil. 1 John 1:
5
Now this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light, 2 and in him there is no darkness at all.
6
If we say, “We have fellowship with him,” while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.
7
But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
8
If we say, “We are without sin,” we deceive ourselves, 3 and the truth is not in us.
9
If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.
10
If we say, “We have not sinned,” we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
There is no evil in God. Evil is the absence of God. The Reformed are dead wrong. God does not create evil; when men acknowledge our sins, He forgives them and brings us to Him. The Calvinist stiff necked sinners who refuse to acknowledge their own pride and sins are not brought into communion with Him. Not by His will, but by theirs.
***...the other books of the Apocrypha...
Why do you hide them?***
Perhaps for the same reason that they hide the Gospels. The message is incompatible with Reformed theology and parading them will prove even to the simple that Reformed theology is unScriptural and incompatible with the Christian God.
***The question is irrelevant to my previous point, and your answer is wrong.***
Go ahead and ask her about my evidence that Calvin actually started the idea of the Prosperity Gospel and his followers have really taken to it over the years. I dare you.
*******************
Gasp!
:)
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