>>God is outside time. He sees all at once whether or not we will choose His will or our own, without causing it. To think God dictates who will choose rebellion because He knows the outcome is to deny His extremely great gift of freedom by which He wants to give us His divinity as much as we the adopted are able to receive it.
That’s a nice workaround, but is neither Calvinst nor non-Calvinist. It is more Buddhist, if you think about it.
Embrace the utter sovereignty of God! He isn’t your buddy. He doesn’t need your worship. You and I add nothing to him. He is the Lord, your God: a being of unimaginable power and knowledge with motives that are as alien to you as your motives are to an ant. If you saw him, you would die. The fact that he stops to choose an unknown percentage of people to know him, desire him, and be drawn to him is the greatest story in the universe.
The Pelagian Heresy, Arminianism, Weslyanism, etc are all just way to make people think that they have the power to “do something” to add to their salvation as a way to convince them to come to church and serve (that was Pelagius’ actual motive. His disciple turned it into a heresy). All non-Calvinist Christianity is literally a way of adding a cliffhanger to this week’s sermon to insure that you show up “next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel”.
It isn’t “a workaround”.
It’s a concept found throughout scripture, and if later false religions like Buddhism and Hinduism incorporate the same concept that is irrelevant.
The way I can understand this is this illustration I learned in Bible college:
Imagine a door into heaven and the sign on the front reads, “Whosoever will..”. Once you enter, the sign on the inside of that door reads, “Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world.”
I believe the Arminian statement of faith has a few minor errors that certainly do not put them outside the boundaries of the Christian faith.
The Canons of Dort was a response to a statement of faith by the Arminians. I have read the Arminian statement of faith; and it it not even close to what hyper-Calvinists claim it to be.
It was primarily a dispute between one groups of Dutchmen and another group of Dutchmen.
You’ve probably heard the joke that goes, “You can tell a Dutchman, but you can’t tell him much.” There is some truth to that statement.