By the way, Brian. As requested, I just read your take on Romans 9. It is fundamentally flawed because you began with the assumption that it's all about individual salvation/reprobation, and interpreted it accordingly. So did Piper, in that quote of him.
Now before you accuse me of doing the same thing from the opposite direction, hear me out.
As stated yesterday, was Paul's context the salvation of Pharaoh via the Gospel? Nope. Was Jacob's or Esau's? Nope. These representatives of those nations, as used in the overall plans of God, was Paul's point because (as I think you agreed in your own writing) that was bound to be the very objection an outraged Jew would have raised:
"Where do you get off suggesting God is mad at us?" an outraged Jew asks Paul. "We have the fathers, the covenants, the promises, the prophets --"
"All true," Paul concedes. "But you're faithless, and such faithlessness has caused God to do such things before. Look at how He had Jacob and Esau play out. Look at what He did with Pharaoh's Egypt. And need I remind you that He's put Israel in time out more than once? I tell you now, brothers, that He will do it again because of your stubborn, ignorant unbelief. And if He does, you will have no grounds to complain OR to blame Him because you were warned," Paul replies. |
That's my condensed paraphrase of the rhetorical exchange this section of Romans.
So now, please consider the following VERY carefully, Brian:
Would the Jews who'd raise the objections Paul anticipated have been objecting to God, in eternity past, supposedly electing and reprobating individuals to soul salvation from sin, or to damnation? Would THAT have been a devout, law-minded Jew's problem? No. As far as I'm aware, the Jews didn't really HAVE such a concept as that.
So for you to be correct that Paul championed Calvinism in Romans 9, those Jews needed to be objecting to the very things people like me object to.
But they weren't. They were operating under a whole other theological, soteriological and eschatological paradigm -- God's nation of priests -- that from Moses onward had centered on national Israel.
Yet the horrid superimposition Calvinists force into the minds of those Jews,
and into the mind of Paul, in order to force it upon the text, is that
they were all thinking in the Pauline paradigm
we think in today...particularly, your Calvinistic paradigm.
Are you prepared to go that far?
Because you already have.
That's why I said yesterday that claiming those Jews' objections were identical to mine (or mine to theirs), and that Paul was the proto-Calvinist is the worst kind of blasphemous eisegesis. You are promoting and defending gravely serious error that you'd best repent of.