Clete:
You are very good at misquoting Calvin.
You a very good at lying.
I've not simply quoted him, I've provided references to where the quote is located and where it can be read for free by anyone curious enough to do so. Further, as I've said a couple of times already, I have yet to find a Calvinist who will disagree with a syllable of what I've quoted, yourself included.
Yes, I know. That's why you fail.
How many of those hundreds of posts contain Calvinists telling you that you are misrepresenting Calvinism?
None that I recall.
There are some I'm sure but none of them that could substantiate the claim. Calvinists make claims all the time. It's actual arguments they seem unable to formulate, especially the ones on this website.
I’m fine disagreeing with Calvin, I’m a Reformed Baptist.
Well you can disagree all you want but it's mindlessness to do so. His doctrine follows logically from the premises that I guarantee that you do no disagree with. Namely the primary Calvinist premise of Immutability.
You really have only two options from which to choose (by your own free will, of course)...
1. Accept that God cannot change in any way whatsoever.
2. Reject the whole of Calvinism's distinctive doctrines.
There is no rational third option. You don't get to pick and choose which doctrines you like and which you would rather disagree with. I mean, of course, you are capable of doing that but, like I said, you'd be doing so mindlessly. You can't rightly claim to have a systematic theology or a rationally coherent worldview if you accept a premise and reject the conclusions that follow from it or if you do the reverse and accept conclusions but reject the premises upon which they are based.
If Augustine was right and God is immutable then everything Calvin said follows logically from that single premise, including all the blasphemous filth that you so desperately want to believe that I'm misquoting.
Calvin was strongly paedo-Baptist.
Why bring up infant baptism? The belief is that it removes original sin, by the way. Did you know that?
Also, I don't thinks its supposed to be a hyphenated word. I think it's just "paedobaptist" but I could be wrong on that. Regardless, the practice is just a hold over from Catholicism. It wasn't the only error that the reformers failed to excise from Christianity and it is not relevant to this discussion so I don't see why you would bring it up.
In other words, you have been confronted with the truth that you are misrepresenting Calvinism and have made a practice of pushing down straw men and you prefer that to actually doing the intellectually honest work of accurately representing the system you aim to critique.
I've been debating this topic for twenty years! Do you think you're the first person to claim that I'm misrepresenting something? You're certainly not! But as all the others, you too will fail to substantiate that claim. I've not only debated dozens of Calvinists myself but I've read (and listened to) Sproul, Pink, Van Til and just about any other Calvinist author you're likely to be able to name.
I am not misrepresenting anything. If you think otherwise, it is you who have it wrong and need to do the intellectually honest work, not me.
Maybe you're not the Calvinist your pastor lead you to believe you are.
Of course God is in meticulous control of every event. Name me the events where you think God fell asleep at the wheel.
God is not meticulously controlling it when a pervert penetrates a 5 year old child.
God was not meticulously controlling it when Jeffery Dahmer raped, murdered, dismembered and ate other sexual perverts.
God was not meticulously controlling it when people would burn their own children as a sacrifice to their false god.
Jeremiah 19:5 [God speaking](they have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come into My mind),
Now, you go ahead and tell me I'm wrong! Tell me that you believe that God is meticulously in control of every molecule that sticks to the toilet paper after you've used it!
Tell me that God has to not only be a first person witness to but in active meticulous control of every vile act that occurs in all of the back rooms of every gay bar in America at once.
Tell me that God is in meticulous control of whether the abortionist clips off the babies leg before his head or the other way around.
Go ahead tell me that!
You either don't know what you're talking about or you just a liar.
I gave you the direct quote of Calvin himself. I mean it couldn't get any more directly out of the horse's mouth than that!
Don't believe Calvin? How about Pink?...
If God was able to subdue your will and win your heart, and that without interfering with your moral responsibility, then is He not able to do the same for others? Assuredly He is. Then how inconsistent, how illogical, how foolish of you, in seeking to account for the present course of the wicked and their ultimate fate, to argue that God is unable to save them, that they will not let Him. Do you say, “But the time came when I was willing, willing to receive Christ as my Saviour”? True, but it was the Lord who made you willing (Ps. 110:3; Phil. 2:13) why then does He not make all sinners willing? Why, but for the fact that He is sovereign and does as He pleases! - Arthur W. Pink "The Sovereignty of God in Salvation"
Don't believe Pink either? How about Rev. Gordon Girod...
The grace of God is irresistible. When God has determined to present us with the gift of salvation, we cannot refuse that gift. - Rev. Gordon Girod "Irresistible Grace"
That's just two of literally dozens of quotes from I don't know how many different Calvinist authors that I could quote you! Are they all misrepresenting Calvinism too, their very own professed doctrine?
You think something or someone caused God to choose?
No. I don't. I am not a Calvinist! I don't believe God predestined everything. I don't need to believe that there was a cause for an event that didn't happen.
God didn't choose who would be saved on an individual basis. What God predestined, amoung a few other things, was the creation of the Body of Christ and the salvation of the members of that body, whomever they happen to be.
I’m sure there are some non-compatibilist Calvinists that believe this but most affirm the sentiments of the Westminster Confession.
Do you think Pink or Girod, who I quoted above, rejected the WCF?
You really just do not get it, do you?
I am not suggesting that Calvinists do not say that people go to Hell because they were evil. They absolutely do say that but it amounts to lip service! What they actually believe when you pay close attention to what they actually teach is that people go to Hell because God chose not to regenerate them. And when asked why God chose not to, the answer is "because it pleased Him not to". That's what they believe, Dialogos! That's what your pastor believes, that's what the elders in your church believe and that's what they expect for you to believe! If you insist otherwise too loudly, they will kick you out of that church, I guarantee it.
That’s the confession of faith held to by scores of Calvinists throughout for centuries. I’d bet the Clete Online Calvinistic Confession isn’t subscribed to by a single Calvinist.
You're a laugh. I'm the one who first stated that Calvinists would never state their beliefs in the terms that I state them in but that a rose by any other name is still a rose.
Facts are real and ideas have consequences, dialogos. The doctrines I cite follow logically and directly from a very few base premises and I have all the quotes you can stomach to show that what I say is true, fair and accurate. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend like I don't know what I'm talking about but that's your own problem, not mine.
Have fun pushing down the straw man.
Calling my arguments straw men arguments doesn't magically turn them into such.
If they're straw man arguments, then refute them! Prove it! I dare you.
Let's start with at the base premise of everything Calvinist, the doctrine upon which all of their heresy is based, the doctrine of immutability.
Do you deny believing that God cannot change in any way whatsoever? If so, you'll be the very first I've ever encountered and it will disqualify you as a Calvinist and absolutely would get you disfellowshipped from any church with the word "Reformed" on the sign out front.
Spare us all your tantrum, virtually no one cares about your inability to manage your anger.
No way! You blaspheme God in my presence or quote someone else doing the same, you're going to get anger. Your dislike of it is the point. Get over it or repent.
Try and focus.
Who said they were opposite?
Sproul did, and by extension you did. It isn't my fault that you can't follow what Sproul is saying.
But even the third grader you referenced above can understand that the innocent don’t need mercy.
You're telling me to focus? Who said anything about anyone being innocent? Not me!
Stop transferring your Calvinist mindset to me! (I know, you have no idea what I'm talking about - skip it.)
First, your assessment of a “Calvinist brain” is inconsequential. No one should care. Second, you make the foolish assumption that God’s decree and man’s agency is somehow mutually exclusive despite the fact that you appear to have a rudimentary understanding of compatibilism.
Saying it doesn't make it so, dialogos.
If they aren't mutually exclusive then make the argument!
You think I haven't heard those "arguments" a thousand times before? They all - and I mean all of them - amount to simply making the claim that they are in fact compatible in spite of our pea sized human brains not being able to understand how. That, or they redefine what ever English words they have to redefine in order to remove the obvious contradiction between "God’s decree and man’s agency" as you put it. Calvinist simply state the doctrine as fact, dress it up in very verbose, definitionally contorted commentary and then at the end of the day call it an antinomy. At which point I say, thank you for conceded the debate because that's precisely what they've done.
Go ahead! Surprise me, if you think you can! Show me the argument that does something new, something different, something other than merely making the claim that the two concept are compatible in any rational sense.
In reality, whether you are a strong determinist predestinarian or a Greg Boyd style open theist, man's agency is always subordinate to God's decree. Everything that comes to pass is always in accordance with God’s decree, and it is frankly, dumb to state otherwise.
It is blasphemy to have even written that sentence!
You will give an account for every idle word.
My advice is repentance.
But of course, you must believe that God decreed your blasphemy and so how could you have done otherwise?
It's utter insanity.
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. (Romans 8:29-30 ESV)
Clearly, the bible says “people” are the object of God’s predestination.
You don't have the faintest idea what Romans 8 is even about!
It would be funny if it weren't so tragic! I wonder how many times a Calvinist thinks that Paul changes subjects in Romans? Just in chapters 7 through 9 they must think he changed subjects half a dozen times. How does anyone make sense of the bible when they read it as though it were a huge collection of mostly disconnected passages that have no flow or connection to the passages that came before or that come immediately after?
Paul did not just drop what he had just spent the previous almost eight full chapters talking about to bring up a whole new topic and say,"Oh yeah, by the way, you didn't have any choice in the matter, God predestined whether you'd believe or not." No! Paul is continuing right along with the same subject he had already been discussing and he is saying that God planned in advance that those who would believe would be made like Jesus. Those in the Body of Christ have been glorified (past tense) in Him! It isn't that we are currently glorified in our flesh but that Christ has been glorified and that we are in Him and thus we are glorified by virtue of the fact the we are members of His Body and that He has been glorified.
It's not really even a concept that can be properly communicated in two or three sentences and there is no hope at all of understanding what is being said if one simply rips those two verses out of the context of not only the chapter they're in but the book and even the entire ministry of the book's author, not to mention the nature of the God whom he was ministering for! One has to understand who God is, that He is just, that He is rational, personal, righteous and loving and that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but wills that all should come to repentance and that "whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame", which Paul states maybe a page after the two verses you've yanked out of context.
You’ve yet to make an argument against my doctrine.
Of course I have!
Remember Ezekiel 18?
The God of the bible (the only one that actually exists) is just and cannot be otherwise, therefore He could not choose who to save and who to condemn to Hell arbitrarily.
Calvinist believe that God chose before time began for no reason other than it pleased Him to do so (arbitrarily).
Therefore, Calvinism is unbiblical.
Therefore, Calvinism is false.
Mostly? Which part of the gospel do you reject?
But God doesn’t owe anyone forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t a matter of justice.
Who said anything about God owing forgiveness?
And forgiveness is not divorced from justice. God does not act in any manner that is inconsistent with justice. God is Justice! God cannot simply wink at sin and pretend that it didn't happen. That would turn God's heaven into Hell eventually. Further, God tells us repeatedly that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. For the wages of sin is death. One way or another that sin debt will be paid and it is because of the innocent blood that Christ willingly shed that God is able to forgive sin at all and remain just.
It was God’s mercy that made us alive together with Christ. We were justly, objects of God’s wrath. We have been made, mercifully, alive together with Christ.
When (if) we believed! Not before!
You completely misunderstand John 3:16. It isn’t a statement on the breadth of Christ's atonement, common, rookie mistake. It’s a statement on the way God chose to love the world.
It means exactly what it says. It isn't written in code.
In reality, you are the one limiting the value of the death of the Son of God. Your atonement doesn't save anyone, it merely makes men savable by themselves.
Stupidity.
I can't save myself! God offers me salvation, I both acknowledge my need for salvation and accept God's freely offered gift.
When you get a gift from your Mother, do you feel like you've earned it by having accepted it?
Did the servant in Christ's parable earn the forgiveness of his debt (Matthew 18:27), was it offered out of obligation or out of compassion?
Right!
“For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. (Rom 5:19 ESV)”
Why do you say I'm wrong and then quote the one verse that proves that I'm right?
Except that you continue....
Ezekiel isn't disputing original sin in Chapter 18. God is saying that I'm responsible for my own sinful actions, not the sinful actions of my father.
:chuckle:
Did you write this as a joke?
But I wasn't born Tabula Rasa, capable of living a perfect, pristine life that never needed the blood of Christ. No, both my father and I are sinners. We both were born with a sin nature inherited by our first parents that eventually rears its ugly head in both of our lives. He dies for his sinful actions, I die for mine. We were both born sinners because of Adam. Romans 5:19 isn't erased by Ezekiel 18.
That might pass as a version of total depravity - sort of - but it has nothing at all to do with original sin. The doctrine of original sin says that you are born in sin, that you are guilty from conception and deserving of Hell fire from your mother's womb and that it is so because Adam sinned.
Now, you can throw your hands in the air and deny that this is what the doctrine teaches and that I'm misrepresenting it but if you do, you're a liar. That's what the doctrine is - period.
And what you said isn't even total depravity. Total depravity is the doctrine that teaches that the unregenerate does nothing at all that is good - period. He is evil to his core, that he was born in sin and every blink of his eye continues that sin and nothing good is possible unless and until God regenerates him.
The Calvinist will often attempt to worm around the injustice of both doctrines by taking the position that is this condition itself that is referred to as original sin and they say that it was merely caused by Adam's sin but the result is the exact same. One way or the other, Adam ate sour grapes and all of mankind's teeth were set on edge.
What do you mean, "So?".
By the way, Romans 2 does not teach that some gentiles earned their way into eternal salvation by obedience to a law they knew by instinct, this is a perverted doctrine of your own mind and you should repent of it. The whole point of Romans 2 was to preface the conclusion of Romans 3:23.
This is just too stupid! So Romans 2, which is talking about people who have never even heard of the Jewish scripture, never mind Jesus Christ and then its supposed to be the self same folks who are being referred to in chapter 3 as "being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus". You can't be both evangelized and unreached at the same time.
Romans 2:14 for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, 15 who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them)
"The soul who sins shall die. But if a man is just, He shall surely live!” Says the Lord God." Ezekiel 18:5 & 9
Clete
