All Bishop Minatios treatise states is that no one can understand predestination. This to me is a spurious argument. If someone states that they understand something how can somebody else say, "No you don't."
People could understand predestination. The problem is they simply don't wish to come to the obvious conclusion. They have man's free will fixed within their tiny brains and nothing is going to bounce that out. Everything revolves around man's will and nothing around what God wills. To be perfectly blunt, this is simply forming God into our own image.
2)Not all men have faith.
3)Therefore God doesn't give faith to all men.
No, that is not all. It says, correctly, that we cannot fully comprehend the omnipotence of God who both foreknows and reflects our will. But he also explains what we can understand, -- that Divine Predestination is an outcome of our free will. It does so by referring to fundamental scriptural episodes that illustrate predestination and free will, such as the Esau's forfeit of his birthright to Jacob and Judas's betrayal.
The arrogance of Protestants never ceases to amuse me. Just how does God foreknow? Have you forgotten the passage about "My thoughts are not your thoughts...."
What's almost funny if it weren't tragic for your spiritual wellbeing is that the Protestants always talk about the sovereignty and absolute power of God, yet they continuously reduce His mysteries to "logical" sequecnes that we are perfectly equipped to understand.
Such as that even children can understand Scripture! Isn't that a Protestant view? Unless you design integrated circuits, do you understand how a TV works? You may know how to turn it on, and that's about it. Well, God gave us some knowledge of Him in the Scriptre and in the Flesh, and that is no more than the "On" button on your remote control.
And we are forming God into our own image?
You say 1)Faith is a gift of God. 2)Not all men have faith. 3)Therefore God doesn't give faith to all men. Augustine saw this clear logic...
If that's what he said? If he did, then +Augustine was wrong on this, and so are you.
We are all subject to God's laws. If we have no faith, it can not be because God didn't give it to us, but because some choose not to believe that which is in their hearts.
By saying that you understand God's predestination you are implying that you are superior to Him. For, how can a tool understand the Maker? God cannot be defined or explained, or understood with our faculties. He can only be believed. True faith is the moment when all reason stops.
Any logical approach that leads you to conclude that you "understand" God better, as to how He does or accomplishes things in real time, rest assured you are in error lest you be the master of Him.
"1)Faith is a gift of God.
2)Not all men have faith.
3)Therefore God doesn't give faith to all men.
Augustine saw this clear logic. Cyprian taught it to Augustine. Even I understand it. But understanding and wisdom are also gifts from God."
My comment:
I'd be cautious with claiming logic for your position, dear HarleyD. The very nature of a gift is that it can be refused. You left out the fourth point: God can give a gift but a gift is not truly a gift until a recipient accepts it. If someone forces something on you it ceases to be a gift. If the Bible truly means "gift" then it has to mean a refusable offer.
To be quite blunt about it: we've been trying to give you a gift of deeper insight into biblical theology but you've steadfastly refused to "get it." No matter how hard we try we can't force you to accept our gift.
Or to put it another way: if I give my sister-in-law a gift of some tickets to the New York Knicks game and she angrily refuses them because I forgot to pass a message on from her to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law is now not speaking to her, my "gift" to her has become nothing but a pair of tickets. Had she received them, I would have gifted her and she would have been gifted and grateful. True, my intent to gift her, to be kind to her, is still very real and true even if she refuses to receive. But as real as my intent is, she has received no gift--no gift-reality exists, no gift exists. She was offered one, true, but she has not received it and no gift was given.
Therefore, the fact that not all men have faith could result from two possibilities:
1. God did not give them the gift of faith
2. God did give them the gift of faith but they refused it.
Your logic is elementarily fallacious.
Of course, you do have a way out, which I'll be so kind as to point out to you: you could try to argue that "gift" here doesn't really mean gift but an unrefusable imposition by God on us.
Of course, if that's what God meant to say, one does have to wonder why he didn't say it.
And if that's what God meant by "gift," we would only know it because you, an interpreter for God, have told us what God really meant. It's very kind of you to help God out like this--he used the word "gift" but he really meant the opposite, an unrefusable imposition, but thankfully, you know what God really meant (crafty old Guy, that God, who uses words that mean the opposite of what he meant to say). I mean, it's not like God didn't have other words at his disposal that meant what he meant--"law" or "nonnegotiable obligation" or "imposition"--there are words for these meanings in Greek, yet, puzzlingly, God chose the word "gift." Ah, well, God's ways are mysterious. How grateful we are that you have penetrated behind the veil God put over Scripture when he used a word that means the opposite of what he meant. Frankly, I don't know how God got along without your help for millennia before you came along.
In any case, I'll add my thanks to what I'm sure is immense gratitude that God has toward you for for reinterpreting the plain meaning of Scripture to us.
If you had not set us straight on what God really meant by "gift," I would have said that by no stretch of the imagination can "gift" mean "law" or unrefusable offer. We never use the word gift for something that we cannot, absolutely cannot, refuse. But your imagination stretches quite a ways, since you offered "gift" as the proof that your position of non-refusability is Biblical.
So, I'm glad to see that we agree on one thing: the interpretive elasticity of Scripture. Except that you make it so elastic that I scarcely recognize it. I'd prefer not to stretch the meaning of gift so far as to turn it into its opposite. But if you wish to strain at gnats, I guess I can't stop you--after all, I believe you have free will. It's you who don't believe that.
As for me and my house, we'll stick with gift meaning refusability. Hence our belief in free will.
And I think Cyprian would be amazed at how far you stretched Scripture in this instance. I don't think he taught to Augustine this meaning of "gift."
But then, I could be wrong. You have a direct pipeline to Cyprian, I presume. (But I thought you didn't believe in appealing to extra-scriptural authorities?)