Posted on 12/29/2001 1:02:06 PM PST by AndrewSshi
A planet of playthings, You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. --Rush, “Freewill,” ©1980.
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance.
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
“The stars aren’t aligned-
Or the gods are malign”
Blame is better to give than receive.
…
All preordained-
A prisoner in chains-
A victim of venomous fate.
Kicked in the face,
You can't pray for a place
In Heaven's unearthly estate.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear-
I will choose Free Will.
When Martin Luther defied a Pope and proclaimed salvation only through the ineffable grace of God, he had no idea that he was rending the body of the ancient church that had for so long known only unity. As his revolution spread, though, all Christendom watched as the Church began to fracture like one of the rose windows smashed by a maddened Swiss mob. Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and a large portion of the Swiss cantons turned away from the faith they had known for centuries, causing no small consternation in a civilization that valued timeless truths above novelty, and which viewed the past as the repository of truth and the present and future as decay. When the reformers were accused by men like Cardinal Sadoleto of pulling away from their faith for the sake of unprecedented novelties, both Luther and Calvin responded that it was their medieval forbears who had introduced devilish novelties into the Church, and that they were merely restoring Christianity to its ancient form (“Reply,” 56).
Such claims and counter claims were absolutely vital in the spirit of those times. For if Christ had indeed left His authority with a body of believers upon his ascension, then any faction claiming to possess the true meaning of His scriptures would logically have to be in agreement with that original body that carried on Christ’s truth after His return to His Father. It is outside of the purview of the discipline of history to ask questions about the existence and nature of God or the supernatural claims of any institution. We can, however, examine the claims of historical continuity by the various parties involved: Were Doctors Luther and Calvin reclaiming an ancient theology obscured by centuries of scholastic decadence, or were they, as their opponents claimed, introducing novelties never before seen under the sun? I intend, through an examination of patristic sources in comparison to Luther and Calvin, to demonstrate that the reformers reclaimed certain Augustinian principles, but in carrying them to their logical extremes, went to lengths that were utterly without precedent.
In examining the Reformation and its dogmas, we must first understand the key fulcrum upon which the reformation turned. This point, though, is often obscured when navigating through a list of secondary issues like use of images, liturgical style, church property, etc. We would do well to note that all of these issues pale besides that which drove the reformers to the lengths they went—“Therefore it is clear that, as the soul needs only the Word of God for its life and righteousness, so it is justified by faith alone and not any works; for if it could be justified by anything else, it would not need the Word, and consequently it would not need faith.” The reformation stands or falls on the basis of the assertion that man is justified before God only through His ineffable grace, by faith alone.
At the outset, this should not seem like too much of a problem. Even the most adamant pre-Vatican II Catholic will acknowledge the corrupt nature of man and inability to approach the righteousness of Christ without divine grace. Why then, did the reformers’ preaching of grace cause such a stir? If we delve below the surface, the problem with sola fide soon becomes apparent. If salvation comes by grace through faith alone, then no works of man can have anything do to with his salvation. If that is the case, then, as Luther tells us, this discounts any act of the will, for if one were to be able to will oneself to believe, faith would simply be a meritorious work (Luther, 135). Calvin reaches a similar conclusion in his Institutes (XXI, 1), and such thinking leaves us with the uncomfortable notion that, if one is to be saved by faith alone, then man, shorn of his free will, is reduced to the role of a puppet dancing on God’s strings. This of course opens up a host of other difficulties, and the perplexed believer is left asking if God in His love also responsible for evil. In the end, the Roman Catholic Church rejected reformed dogma in order to defend the doctrine of man’s freedom (Tracy, 101).
This rejection then left the reformers in the position of standing against the ancient Catholic Church and demanding that they, rather than the ancient church, possessed apostolic truth. Erasmus of Rotterdam had this to say about Luther’s claim to have re-discovered the truth:
Even though Christ’s spirit might permit His people to be in error in an unimportant question on which man’s salvation does not depend, no one would believe that this Spirit has deliberately overlooked error in His church for 1300 years, and that He did not deem one of all the pious and saintly Church Fathers worthy to be inspired, with what, they contend, is the very essence of all evangelical teaching (Erasmus, 19).Erasmus lays a fairly serious charge at Luther’s feet. The answer, then to the question of whether or not the reformers held views in concord with the ancient church lies in ascertaining Erasmus’s assertion that the denial of free will is completely alien to the historical record of the Church’s teachings.
Since Erasmus felt it meet to bring the Church Fathers into the discussion, I shall begin my examination with patristic sources. I intend first to examine the works of Justin Martyr, a second century convert and one of the first Christian apologists. I intend to examine Justin’s work as a case study for several reasons, chief of which are that his first and second apologies were written both to answer objections to the Christian faith and outline its basic principles, and, if we are looking for a picture of early Christianity as handed down to the apostles, we could do no better than to examine the product of a Church removed from the death of the last apostle by less than a century.
To properly comprehend the early Church’s positions on the freedom of the will, we must first examine the philosophical background of the classical world from which Christianity emerged. We quickly find that, as a general rule, the classical world was hostile to the notion of humanity possessing the free ability to choose. Democritus with his mechanistic view of the cosmos and the Eleatics with their monism both held that all events and choices were under the sway of a deterministic necessity (“Free Will”). Aristotle was a bit more optimistic, allowing for contingency, but then, with his cosmos brought into being by a primum mobile, it is hard to escape the notion that all subsequent causes must be dependent of the first cause (ibid). Nor did the stoics allow for free choice, which was precluded by their pantheistic picture of the universe (ibid). It was against such background that Christianity addressed the issue of man’s freedom.
In Chapters XLIII and XLIV of his Second Apology, Justin examines the question as to whether or not men are free. His conclusion is an unambiguous rejection of the classical world’s determinism. Martyr makes several arguments, one based on a usage of the term “devour” in Isaiah, and another on the dubious notion that Plato learned what he knew from the Hebrew prophets (Martyr, XLIV). We shall pass over these, though, in favor of the much more powerful argument of responsibility. He tells his reader “unless the human race have the power of avoiding evil and choosing good by free choice, they are not accountable for their actions” (Martyr, XLIII). Justin hammers this point home further in stating that God made man, “not like other things, as trees and quadrupeds, which cannot act by choice” (ibid). For Martyr, the sinner would not be worthy of punishment if his action were not of his own volition, but a result of the condition in which he was made (ibid). He then quotes Deuteronomy 30:15, 19: “Behold before thy face are good and evil: choose the good” (1.2.5).
Augustine in his answer affirmed that man does evil through the use of his free choice (Free Choice, 1.16.35), and that evil comes not from God, but rather from a negation of His goodness, that is, in a man turning from the good that which is God to follow his own desires (ibid, 2.20.54). In agreement with Justin Martyr, he asks rhetorically, “How could a man be punished justly, if he used his will for the very purpose for which it was given” (ibid, 2.1.3)? He goes on to state that to be justly punished, sin must be committed by a free act of the will (ibid).
In this context, when Augustine speaks of the decrees of God, he speaks of God’s predestination as coming through the foreknowledge of His omniscience. Indeed, he goes out of his way to state that foreknowledge is not the same as compulsion (Free Choice, 3.4.10), and states that, simply because God has foreseen an evil does not mean that He is responsible (ibid, 3.4.11). He draws the notion of foreknowledge to its logical conclusion, stating that because God foreknows everything, then events must happen as He has foreseen (ibid, 3.3.8). This appears to satisfactorily wrap up the issue of God’s decrees.
All of the above would seem to create the impression that God’s only action in working out His will is in foreseeing that which will occur and thus working out His will through man’s will. But we must carefully bear in mind that Augustine is speaking of the origins of evil. We have not yet examined what Augustine taught from scripture concerning, not man’s reprobation, but his salvation. When we look to this issue, the picture of Augustine becomes much murkier.
Augustine notes that the first man fell through his own completely free choice. Adam, in Augustine’s thinking, was completely free to choose either good or evil, and opted for evil (Free Choice, 3.24.73). From this point, humanity was enslaved to original sin. The original sin came through free will, but subsequently, though still free, the will was subject to corruption, and thus, unable to rise to salvation. This can be summed up in the statement, “But, though man fell through his own will, he cannot rise through his own will” (ibid, 2.20.54).
At this point in his career, Augustine might have been willing to acknowledge that man can freely look for the grace of God in order to assist him in doing good, stating that man, though subject to concupiscence, nonetheless has the knowledge of God, by whose grace he might rise to a higher state (ibid, 3.19.53). If we were to cease our examination of Augustine here, we would find a ready partisan of Rome, affirming man’s free choice, predestination through foreknowledge, and the ability of man to choose God. Alas, the picture is not that simple.
For at the turn of the fifth century, the notorious heretic Pelagius preached that man in and of himself had the ability to be perfect, and that the fall of Adam, rather than plunging the whole of the human race into sin, served merely as a bad example (Nature and Grace, 9.10). To the dismay of the good Doctor, Pelagius and his followers sought to bolster support for their beliefs with Augustine’s very own writings on free will (Retractions, 1.9.3). Augustine’s response to this heretic’s teachings generated his later writings on the will, predestination, and divine grace.
It must be noted that Augustine’s later writings on original sin and predestination seems to show a markedly different posture from his earlier work on free will. While it has been argued that this hardened stance was due either to his reaction to the fall of Rome or the Pelagian heresy, it is more likely that his own views were gradually evolving under the influence of St. Paul, independent of external circumstances. I base my judgment on Augustine’s quotation of his Retractions in On the Predestination of the Saints:
I indeed labored in defense of the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God conquered, and only thus was I able to arrive at the point where I understood that the Apostle spoke with the clearest truth, “For who singles you out? Or what do you have that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it” (1 Corinthians 4:7, qtd. in Predestination, 4.8)?The above taken into account, the later Augustine still believes that those who choose faith in Christ do so of their own free will, but with the important caveat that God has prepared the will of the elect to choose Him (Predestination, 6.11). Under these teachings of Augustine, free will alone is insufficient to believe in Christ, and indeed, if free will is enough for the believer to be saved, then “Christ has died in vain” (Nature and Grace, 40.47). The will of man is both corrupt and inadequate to seek salvation. The elect are not called because they believe, but so that they may believe (Predestination, 17.34). We see Augustine at his most Protestant when he further recounts his own changing views in stating “I said most truly: ‘For just as in those “whom God has chosen,” not works initiate merit, but faith…’ [Emphasis added.] But that merit of faith is also a gift of God…” (Predestination, 3.7) Here, then, the Catholic, to his dismay, sees what seems to be protestant doctrine issuing from the pen of the arch-Catholic.
We will be going too far, though, if we make Augustine a five point Calvinist. We must note that, for starters, when he issued a retraction concerning his first writings on the nature of evil, he stated that free will was inadequate for man to rise to God. He never, though, changed his statement that evil comes only from the free exercise of the will, and never denies that in choosing to do evil, Adam was under no compulsion. When he mentions predestination, he is quite clear that only by God’s predestination can man come to an efficacious and saving faith, but what is striking is that predestination is only mentioned regarding salvation. Those that are condemned do so merely because they follow their own corrupt will, and God justly punishes their evil deeds. Augustine takes his stand for grace and salvation through election, while at the same time avoiding the horror of double predestination.
For the next several centuries, the Church would follow this Augustinian path. The Church rejected the teachings of Pelagius, and a hundred years later at the Council of Orange, issued a series of canons affirming the Augustinian position on grace and predestination. Canon 4 states that if anyone contends that God’s cleansing of man from sin is contingent upon the will then he is in error; Canon 5 states that the beginning of faith itself comes from the grace of God rather than the will of man; Canon 6 states that grace does not depend on the cooperation of man (“Canons of Orange”). As the Church moved on through the centuries, she attempted to carry on in the steps of the African Doctor in straddling the fence between grace and free will. By the beginning of the High Middle Ages, though, the Church was pulling back towards a system that acknowledged the primacy of the human will. By the turn of the twelfth century, St. Anselm of Canterbury wrote in his De Concordia that free choice co-exists with divine grace and cooperates with it (Anselm, 453). With such pronouncements, The Church had arrived at a position specifically condemned by St. Augustine (cf. Letter 225). We shall now examine how well Luther and Calvin succeeded in their attempts to return to his teachings.
Luther would be in perfect concord with Augustine in his affirmation of salvation by grace through faith. In The Bondage of the Will, though, he arrives at Augustine, but then passes him completely, arriving in territory where none have trodden before. Augustine stated that man’s fall came through his choice, and the resulting corruption of human nature resulted in a will that commits sin of its own volition. Luther does the good doctor one better, though, and asserts that the wicked man sins “under the impulse of divine power” (Luther, 130). Luther even challenges Augustine in his definition of free will, stating that, if in a fallen state the will is unable to seek God, then it is not in fact free (ibid, 113), and that Augustine and others who have called such a will free are degrading the very word (ibid, 120). Luther goes to the extreme end of the spectrum, and then beyond the pale, but recognizes and embraces this: “Therefore, we must go to extremes, deny free will altogether, and ascribe everything to God” (ibid, 133)!
Indeed, his statement that a will unable to do good is in fact under compulsion makes fine logical sense, but the end result is a man with no freedom, and one whose evil must be the responsibility of divine omnipotence. Luther here returns to the Augustinian notion that in His omnipotence God allows but does not cause the workings of evil in order to further His divine plan (ibid, 130). It almost seems here that Luther is pulling back from the brink of a precipice to which he has been running headlong, staring into an abyss to which he dare not attempt to apply his own feeble reason. And indeed, though throughout this debate on free will with Erasmus Luther employs the techniques of reason and dialectic, in the end he felt that any attempt to use reason to fathom the mind of God was a fairly silly exercise (ibid, 129). As the reformation continued, though, another figure would arrive who would see no problem in attempting to apply human reason to the workings of the Eternal God, taking every statement on grace, sin, and God’s decrees to their horrifying ends, leaping joyfully into the abyss from which Luther held back. That man was Jean Calvin.
Even the extreme bombast of Luther’s Bondage of the Will does not take the horrific final step in the picture it paints of God’s omnipotence. Like Augustine, Luther admits that since the fall, man has been a slave to sin, but Calvin finally dares to examine from whence came the fall. His conclusion, unlike Augustine’s, is that God actively caused the fall of Adam and the whole human race into sin and damnation as part of His “wonderful plan” (Institutes, XXIII, 7). The ruthless Frenchman then goes on to state that God is nonetheless just in punishing the reprobate (ibid, XXIII, 4). Though this horribly contradicts both Augustine and Justin Martyr’s writings of responsibility, Calvin barely hesitates when he states that he is leaving behind the bulk of the Church’s traditions in favor of his alleged ruthless adherence to scripture (ibid, XXII, 1). Calvin has no problem in that asserting that, since salvation is not by works, then neither is damnation (ibid, XXII, 11), and that the reason for the eternal torment of the vast majority of the human race lies, not in their guilt, but in the arbitrary choice of God.
This horror, then, is the end result of the reformation: God has arbitrarily predestined some to eternal life, and has likewise predestined others to eternal damnation. Calvin then states that certain people might object to this, stating that it makes God a cruel tyrant, to which he responds that since God is both omnipotent and the creator of everything, then all that He decrees, ipso facto, is righteous, good, and just (Institutes, XXIII, 2). He then has the chutzpah to go on and tell the reader that his dogma is not one of absolute might, since God is “free from fault,” and the quintessence of Law and Right (ibid).
Jean Calvin then, has started from Augustine, who among the Church Fathers was most friendly to predestination, and taken the teachings of predestination to their logical extreme, crafting a dogma that would have caused St. Augustine to blanch in horror. Did St. Augustine believe in divine election and predestination of believers? Most assuredly. It was up to Jean Calvin, though, to add double predestination and eliminate Augustine’s free will theodicy in favor of a God who has decreed evil and suffering for his own amusement.
I submit, though, that such questions concerning free will and predestination would inevitably have come to the fore and been the cause of controversy even without Luther and Calvin. The reason for this is that Augustine loomed large over the western Church down through the centuries, and at times there seem to be two Augustines. Why is this the case? The reason that there seem to be two St. Augustines lies in the Bible itself, since there seem to be two St. Pauls*. We have the Paul who tells the believer in Romans Chapter 9 that God prepares some men for eternal life and some for damnation, answering the obvious objection to this with a “Who are you, O man, to talk back to God” (Romans 9:20)? On the other hand, we are also told that there is a loving God who “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Such contradictions in the Christian faith, then, were present at its inception.
Indeed, such difficulties are inevitable in any faith that attempts to posit a God who is all-powerful, all knowing, and all good. Paul, who likely never intended to be considered a basis for systematic theology, is all over the map when it comes to how to resolve such questions. As such, there is no pat resolution to these seeming contradictions. Perhaps the error of the church was to seek one; Luther is at his best not when he is glorying in the slavery of man, but when he is proclaiming the mercy of Christ.
---. The Problem of Free Choice. Trans. Dom Mark Pontifex. New York: Newman Press, 1955.
The Problem of Free Choice. Appendix. Excerpt from Retractions.
Calvin, Jean. Excerpts from Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Protestant Reformation. Ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968. 178-221.
---. “Reply to Sadoleto.” A Reformation Debate. Ed. John C. Olin. New York, Fordham University Press, 2000. 43-88.
"The Canons of the Council of Orange.” 529 A.D. Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics.
“Free Will.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Michael Maher. 1909. Transcribed 1999.
Martyr, Justin, Saint. “The Second Apology.” The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Eds. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899. 188-194.
Erasmus of Rotterdam. Excerpts from The Free Will. Winter 3-94.
Luther, Martin. Excerpts from The Bondage of the Will. Winter 98-138.
Interestingly, the "allein" is theologically correct in making Paul's point, even if it is not transliterally correct. Unfortunately, this paraphrastic approach by Luther was a tactical blunder on his part. He was irked at Rome's refusal to get Paul's point, but by using the "allein" to make Paul's point crystal clear, the RCs got to charge Luther with adding to the Scriptures.
Under this pretext, they got to ignore Luther's point--which really was Paul's point.
To appreciate what I am saying, see my #54.
I realized that you would take exception, so I tried to be gentle enough to lay much of the blame on the Catholic Encyclopedia. (I really was trying to be nice. Some of the stuff in your paper was pretty good, and all of it was eloquent!)
Having read the discussions of predestination in the Catholic Encyclopedia, I notice that they invariably make trite, often completely artificial distinctions between Augustinian predestination and Calvinistic predestination. They have to do this. Why? Because Luther and Calvin really did embarrass Rome over and over and over by citing Augustine. (Luther and Calvin understood Augustine very well. Sixteenth Century Rome did not.)
At the bottom line, there are no terribly important distinctions between Augustinian and Calvinistic predestination. They are both absolute, double-predestination positions.
Romanists almost invariably wind up trying to insinuate that Augustine didn't really assert predestination so much as he asserted God's foreknowledge. But Luther (an Augustinian monk) correctly pointed out the God's foreknowledge is fixative and not merely precognitive. And that was Augustine's position. God's foreknowledge is a planning faculty, a thing of awful deliberation.
To illustrate the implications of this, I would point out that Romanists and Arminians try to schmooze over the issues of God's will when they exalt man's will in the overall picture. They say God elects certain sinners only because He foresaw that they would freely believe the gospel. But Augustine specifically denied this. He maintained that foresight of faith cannot be the grounds of election, since the Bible clearly teaches that faith stems from being elect--not the other way around.
And the point you made about Augustine saying that Adam freely chose to sin in Eden is moot. The Calvinist also maintains that Adam freely chose to sin.
In fact, the thoughtful Calvinist actually believes that man does exercise true free will in all of his choices. The Romanists never understood this, because they were determined to define free will as the power of contrary choice (which is actually ludicrous, when you think about the will is). In the interests of steering well clear of that particular error (heck, even God does not have the power of contrary choice!), the Reformers were ultimately forced to re-define the terminology. They chose to speak of free agency rather than the badly misunderstood idea of free will.
But the Reformers' idea of free agency was nothing more than Augustine's idea of free will.
The whole controversy is very involved and occasionally very deep. And in my opinion there have been no RC theologians since Bishop Jansen who have really understood Augustine. (And as an Augustinian/Calvinistic/Biblical predestinarian myself, I actually think the whole thing is a bit funny. So, I urge you to appreciate where I am coming from. I am not trying to be cruel in my criticism.)
Oh, I very much understand. But then, when working with Augustine in the article, I was not using the Catholic Encyclopedia, since it is something of a biased source. What I got out of my reading of On the Predestination of the Saints and The Problem of Free Choice was that single predestination is in there, but double predestination is not. St. Augustine of Hippo sounds Calvinist in some places, but I think to call him such is presenting a bit less of the picture. As to what Augustine thought of predistination as foreknowledge, you have to distinguish between what he wrote earlier in his career and what he wrote later in his career. Earlier in his career, he did, in fact maintain that predestination came through foreknowledge. Later, under the influence of the Pauline letters, he came to the conclusion that predestination was, in fact, an active work of God (which I stated in the article). My only contention is that he was not a proponent of double predestination, and was much less willing to look at the ultimate cause of the Fall than Calvin would be.
Sorry, but man has free will to accept or reject God. God does not force himself on anyone.
You are missing an important point. You are missing everything in the discussion, in fact. You need to think again about what free will is and what it is not.
More to the point, perhaps, you need to think about what the will is. It is not something divorced from the person. It is an expression of the person himself. If we consider the will as a faculty, it is the choosing faculty. The person himself exercises his will. The will is actually the person's choosing.
This creates an enormous mess which you have overlooked, I think. The problem is, fallen sinners are EVIL.
***
Augustine first, then the Scholastic theologians, then Calvin--then all of the rest of the Reformers and the majority of the Anabaptists!--all correctly pointed out that the will is NOT SUSPENDED ABOVE THE PERSON.
The Jesuits argued this idea of "the suspension of the will" when they tried to defend the Papacy against the monumentally serious charges brought by the Protestants, but the Jesuit position is actually patently stupid.
My point is that the will is obviously not a neutral faculty. It is an expression of the sinner.
As I said earlier, fallen sinners are evil. They love darkness rather than light. Apart from supernatural regeneration, they will not receive Truth in a saving way. They will freely chose not to do so.
In other words, their free will is their disaster, because their free will, although free in obvious respect of responsible choosing, is a will bound to their natures. And they are by nature only evil.
Apart from sovereign regeneration by the Spirit, their free will is oddly but necessarily enslaved in their own evil. Apart from supernatural regeneration, they are doomed in unbelief. The problem is, they prefer unbelief. They are hardened idolaters. They are under Satanic power.
What is even more important, the Lord Jesus Himself clearly condemns the notion that evil folks can/will chose the good in a saving way. He says that they WON'T.
So, the idea that man has free will is true. A man will always do as he pleases. But an unregenerate sinner will never be pleased to choose from the heart that which is contrary to his Christ-hating, Creator-hating, Truth-hating heart!
The sinner has to be supernaturally given a new nature before he will repent and believe the gospel. Thus, regeneration has to precede conversion, not follow conversion.
(This is why we pray to the Lord for the conversion of sinners!)
Check me out on this. This historic Protestant perspective is taught practically everywhere in the Bible.
In other words, the will of man is not free in the sense which people thoughtlessly assume for it!
I am going to have to drop off the thread for now, but I would hereby invite OrthoxPresbyterian to share any thoughts he might have concerning Augustine.
The traditional Christian doctrine derived from Augustine is taught nowhere in the Bible.
The underlying doctrinal error of all Augustinian teaching is an incorrect understanding of sin. Sin is not a substance, it is a quality that pertains to only one thing, choice. Wrong choices are sin, right choice are righteousness. If the ability to choose does not exist, because of inability, ingnorance, or any other limitation, there is no moral responsibility and sin becomes an impossiblity.
Check it out. This is taught everywhere in the Bible.
Hank
I don't get my position from Augustine.
I don't get my position from Augustine.
I don't believe anyone needs to "figure out" how bad sin is. It is pretty clearly taught, what it is, and what its consequences are.
One thing for sure, you can't know how bad a thing is, until you know what it is, and if your beliefs are from a church that is Calvinistic, or from the Bible misinterpreted by them, you believe it is something that happens to you, not something you do. You believe sin is a condition you inherited and excuse your sin on the basis of, you can't help it, because you were born that way.
When you learn that sin is what you do, by your own choice, and not something foisted on you by your parents, or great-great-great...grandparents (such as Adam and Eve), you will begin to understand how terrible sin is.
Hank
This is exactly true! Thanks for all your insightful comments in this post. They're "right on"!!
Another "right on" post! I've looked for something I could add, but it appears that you've already nailed everything of importance (that I can think of) down.:D
It is what you ARE that results in what you *will* do.
Have you never read the Scripture that shows that it is the bad "tree" that is the problem ... the fruit is only the "natural result" (or effect) of the problem.
This is not some doctrine, it is life to a dead man, you can't just sit and "discuss" something that you have not experienced.
Well speak for yourself, I'm not a fruit.
Organic fruit is the involuntary product of a plants reproductive funtion. The mataphor our Lord uses, (you seem to have forgotten the reference) are as follows:
Matthew 7:17-19 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Luke 6:43 For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Of course these teach exactly the opposite of what you think they teach. Jesus is not talking about the cause of the fruit, but how to determine a good tree from a corrupt tree. No matter what one believes, or how stronly they believe it, how many times they've been baptized, confessed their sins, or prayed, if they continue to sin, they are corrupt. It does not matter if they are a preacher, priest, theologian, or Bible teacher, if they sin, they are corrupt.
If you think Jesus was teaching that sinners sin because their nature makes them sin, you have no idea what sin is. Do you think sin is something that happens to you, and that God judges people for what happens to them? Find a good concordance and find out how many times the Bible says people will be judged according to their works. Do you just throw those verses out out?
Then compare these words of Jesus:
John 5:28&29 Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.
Hank
That would be funny, if it wasn't a serious matter. Do you know that you're misrepresenting the Scriptural teachings of Calvin by claiming he taught that sin is just something that "happens to you"?
I'm sure you didn't mean to do that, did you?
This is not my position. It's not even close. I do not maintain that sin is merely "an inherited condition." My position is that so long as you remain unregenerate, you are a veritable demon deserving damnation.
That is much more severe than your position. Think about it some more.
I don't know if you realize it, but your whole post just proved my point about the "tree" being responsible for the fruit. I equated you (and all human beings) to "trees" ... not "fruits" and you just turned it totally around. How does that happen?
Here is your above quote with "trees" substituted for "they":
".... trees that have done good (bore good fruit), unto the resurrection of life; and trees that have done evil (bore bad fruit), unto the resurrection of damnation...".
And as you plainly showed from the Scriptures a corrupt tree cannot bear "good fruit". A corrupt unregenerate sinner (tree) cannot choose to "do good" (bear good fruit). It is IMPOSSIBLE.
The corrupt is corrupt. It cannot be anything different from what it is.
That is, unless the Sovereign God bestows His saving grace on it and redeems it from corruption and makes it Holy. Only then can it bear good fruit.
To say it another way, unless God imputes the goodness (holiness) of Jesus to the corrupt sinner (tree) it is impossible for that sinner (tree) to bear good fruit.
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