Posted on 02/28/2010 8:30:39 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.
Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.
No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Where in the Calvinist construct do you attach this loving sentiment to your sovereign God? If he could hate Esau even as Esau was an infant, why would he love every single infant that he kills or allows to be killed. Where is the consistency in your theological construct?
Or are you willing to admit that Calvinism simply does not have all the answers and that on this issue Calvinism might just paint a wrong picture of God?
Could you define grace and mercy for me??
A broken clock....
f course you have scripture that there is an age of reason and that all infants are innocent as opposed to being born in sin ??
No I don't. But under the Calvinist construct all infants are effectively as guilty and deserving of hell as all adults, and God is perfectly capable and perfectly just in sending every infant who dies to hell. If God hated Esau without reference to what he foresaw in him, and if God hated him even as a Child, then God should have no qualms about sending infants to hell for no other reason than to show his justice.
How can you state from your Calvinist construct that God would not send infants to hell for the same reason he sent Esau to hell, i.e., that he chose from the foundation of the earth to hate him? Or do you agree that it is within his nature as God to do such a thing?
Agreed.
“Seems more Molinist.”
Molinism includes “middle knowledge”; contingent options that do not necessarily include God’s determinism. That is not what was said.
“If Esau had died as an infant, God in His omniscience knew what choices Esau would have made in the circumstances determined by God.”
I’m not dismissing grace and mercy, I am simply pointing out that Matthew 7:21-29 and Matthew 25:31-46 denote the need for works on our part.
Good. I like honest answers.
If I see, still in a child, a sense of innocence even in their elementary understanding of good and evil then I am forced to conclude (by my heart, not by Scripture) that they are innocent.
Good. But that is entirely inconsistent with a construct that children are born into a condition wherein they, by virtue of their being born, are as worthy and deserving of Hell as the worst of sinners. If they are innocent in a spiritual sense until they reach some latter stage in life, then the whole construct of Total Depravity seems to fall by its own weight.
My limited sense of justice is not God's.
Is your understanding of scripture equally as limited? Are you willing to consider that the construct which you follow, i.e., Calvinism is as ripe with possible errors as your understanding of the Nature of God's justice? Could it be that maybe Calvinism is not the end all and be all of scriptural understanding? That maybe your understanding of soteriology is as flawed as those whom you criticize here as being Arminian or Catholic? Are you willing to concede that maybe you are wrong?
This will be my last reply unless you can take the time to actually address an argument that I make.
Whatever.
Look at Genesis 6...God repented he had made man because he was evil...God did not exempt unborn babies or children from His judgement ..nor did He exempt the children of the other nations when He told the the children of Israel to destroy them ... he did not remove the children in Sodom when judgement rained from the sky.
Scripture seems to indicate that God looks upon all as sinners , age is not an exemption..
God regenerated John the baptist in the womb of his mother.. I believe that indicates that the Holy Spirit can reveal Christ even to the unborn, or children or the mentally deficient.. God is not hampered by circumstances that we see as impossible..
God is silent on the issue.. so I do not think it wise to make doctrine out of silence .
" Genesis 18: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
I believe we can rest in His mercy and justice..
Just give me the scripture, not YOUR opinion
See we can play nice.. How are ya shadow ???
Catholics as well as some orthodox Lutherans and Anglicans believe that baptism absolutely necessary for the forgiveness of sins in EVERYONE including infants and without this the infants are quite possibly damned.
There are some varying theological beliefs regarding aborted and stillborn babies and there is the question of whether we are born into sin or conceived into sin.
Nevertheless, it seems odd that God would have a plan for salvation where events that would take place AFTER His Sacrifice would benefit some and not others. What is mean is, prior to about a hundred years ago a sizable percentage of children died in infancy or within a few years of birth, in some countries this is still the case. Today, at least in the west, this is not a real factor.
God has not scripturally ruled out that foreknowledge is or can be a basis for his election (indeed it appears to be directly tied in scripture to the issue of predestination), yet the Westminster Confession clearly indicates that God's election is NOT predicated on any such foreknowledge and effectively declares such a belief as heresy.
God has declared (in what I believe to be no uncertain terms) that he sent his Son to die for the sins of the "whole world" and yet Calvinism (at least post-Dordt Calvinism) insists that God's atonement was limited and specific only to those who ultimately are numbered as the elect and the atonement (as well as God's love expressed in John 3:16) are limited and specific only to the elect and not directed to the world as a whole.
It means if we have been given God's saving grace we will "do something" that is God-pleasing and God-glorifying. And only then.
Arminians and Roman Catholics believe men of their own accord, with assistance of the Holy Spirit, can be righteous through their own free will choice to believe.
That is denied in the Gospel. John 6:44. Romans 9:11. Anything not of faith is sin. And faith is a free gift of grace from God to whom He will.
"But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you." -- John 10:26
The arguments against God's eternal and ever-lasting election according to His own good pleasure and not due to anything in men are exactly the same from the Roman Catholic and the Arminian. It's why we have Roman Catholics agreeing with Arminians on these many threads about how and why men are saved -- they both presume an ability in men which, in their fallen state, they do not possess. Only after God decides to regenerate the blind eyes and deaf ears and stony heart and superstition-filled minds are men able and willing to believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ to their merciful salvation.
And that is God's call; not men's. Men had their chance in Adam to do the right thing, and all men through Adam failed.
Thank God for Christ's intervening, accomplished, predestined, targeted, specific work on the cross. The only work that saves. The only anything that saves.
We all went through the stage where we complained "but what about the rest of the world?"
And there's only one answer to that -- God elects to accomplish His own purpose and not because we've done anything righteous ourselves to earn His approval because only Christ is righteous. So we trust Him and the future because thankfully, we know whatever God decides will be all good and God-glorifying.
Do we understand that fully? Of course not. It still seems "unfair" to our John Dewey-instilled sense of egalitarianism.
But this is what the Bible says. And it says it clearly and firmly. Men do not choose to believe. Men are given faith to believe. If God has numbered a man to be among His family, that man will, at a time of God's choosing, understand the Gospel to know his salvation has been won for Him by Christ risen from the cross.
That's Christianity. All else presumes too little of God and too much of men.
ping to 315. I can’t keep track of these discussions. 8~)
Is that doctrine or dogma? Most children who die are NOT baptized. In Islamic Countries, it is effectively prohibited. So any doctrine that claims that the mere absence of some ritual performed by some other human being condemns a child to eternal damnation is clearly as offensive to the human spirit as any claim by Calvinism that God elects his chosen for no other purpose than his good pleasure. Such a doctrine or dogma clearly assigns a substantial portion of infants to eternal hell merely by the accident of their birth.
How is that any less offensive than a doctrine which states that God alone chooses who will or will not be sent to heaven and hell merely by virtue of his own unconditional application of grace to whom he so chooses?
In this case I think that the Calvinist position, although clearly inconsistent with its own theological construct shows a more merciful and just God than the Catholic or Lutheran understanding.
LOL! We agree on a lot more than we disagree.
How are ya shadow ???
Doing well. Haven't seen you around here much recently.
Took a rest from posting for a time.. after a while it seems it is always the same thing:)
Glad all is well for ya brother !
Understood. How's N3WBI3?
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