Posted on 05/23/2002 8:27:47 PM PDT by xzins
Looking at God's grace through a Calvinistic view is missing what God means by grace, a pastor told students at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary March 4.
"Calvinism presents a God who arbitrarily selects some to be saved and some to be lost," Frank Page, pastor of Warren Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga., said in a chapel sermon. Grace, he said, is not a term of selection but an expression of love and acceptance.
Calvinism is a theological system outlined by the 17th century Reformer John Calvin. It is built around five central points, of which the most controversial is the notion that Christ died only to save certain people and not others.
Proponents of Calvinism--a growing group among Southern Baptists today, including the presidents of two Southern Baptist seminaries--often call their theology "doctrines of grace." But Page asserted the Calvinistic perspective misses the most important nature of grace.
"It portrays a nature of God who is capricious and even cruel in his selection of those who would be elect and non-elect," he said.
Page cautioned that by seeing a God who selects his children randomly with no concern for the lost, Christians are not genuinely seeing who God is.
1. Calvinism teaches a god who has no real concern for the lost.
2. Calvinism teaches a capricious and cruel god.
Thanks for the post bro.
Amazing Grace is WHAT saved a wretch like me. Grace is about reaching out to the lost. It's about loving the unlovable.
How in the world can you turn "grace" into a "select and sort" word? That's such a gross distortion.
What do you want to bet that when I start posting Biblical refutations of the Arminian version of grace that the Arminians get nasty again? Let's see, perhaps I might start with a few "quotable quotes" from Arminians....
Amen! Love is the motivating virtue of God! It is why He began to create in the first place, to share His own happiness with other creatures.
The Glory that He receives comes from His desire to to this, not from that fact that He is omnipotent!
Calvinism makes Power the primary attribute with God, but Power could not avoid the Cross.
Justice demanded a payment for sin and only Love would be willing to meet that demand.
God with all His Power still had to obey His own virtues!
That God would be willing to do this for man (Ps.8) (not just a chosen few) is beyond man's capacity to imagine.(Rom.5:6-8)
Gee, have I heard that somewhere before? This guy has nailed it. Capricious and cruel? Sure, the local construct defenders will defend that. They'll call it "good pleasure."
A critic might demand: Is this not a cruel God? If no, prove it is not! You biblicists have a capricious and cruel God!
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Get the point? Your charge of capriciousness and cruelty to God because of His sovereign election is no less repulsive.
I'm sorry, but it's a term of arbitrary exclusion and misplaced elitism which has no part in the Christian Gospel.
The concept of 'election' in your construct is only a term of 'love and acceptance' to the few (admittedly) non-meritorious 'winners' in the prehistoric Powerball lottery. However, it is a term of hatred, viciousness and arbitrary rejection to the many-fold lottery 'losers' who, according to your construct, were excluded without hope or opportunity long before they were born. That hardly qualifies as 'good news' to those excluded.
I am sorry because, unlike so many of your colleagues here, you are a kind and thoughtful person with a wonderful family. But you have subscribed to a fearful view of Jesus, which recasts Him as an unbelievable ogre, 'rejoicing' in the eternal torment of people excluded without hope from the beginning of time -- people for whom, in reality He died. I shudder to think about it -- because it is such pure evil. It is message of hatred, vitriol, and exclusion unworthy of you.
Praise God, it is also wholly false. Christ died for all and offers to all who accept Him, life abundant and life eternal.
You call "my views" pure evil. If that's what you think, fine. Please refer to me as the Evil Calvinist.
Was God cruel to crush His Son for us and to cause Him to suffer? Isaiah 53:10 --- I don't think so. Do you?
Steve, God crushed Jesus in that he sent him to the cross. This is the same God who foretold the glorious resurrection for this Son.
However, with the "elected lost" it is not a temporary sentence. According to calvinism, PRIOR to their EVER HAVING LIVED, he sends these prelected lost to eternal torment in hell with no hope ever of reprieve. (And they call that "grace?"
It's just bad theology.
Do I express your argument correctly?
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