ECT The Calvinist 5 Solas

[Clete]

James 1:17
Psalm 100:5
Romans 11:29
Job 23:13
Psalm 33:11
Hebrews 6:17

Look who's lying now, Nang!

Did you only post the verse references and not the text because you knew intuitively that they didn't support your claim nor contradict my argument?

There is not one single syllable of Calvinism's distinctive doctrines found anywhere in the bible. Any of it you think is there, you've brought to it in an a priori fashion. You are reading your doctrine into the text.

 

[Clete]

Who walked in the garden with A&E?

Not relevant. God can appear without having flesh.

The bible explicitly states and you have affirmed that God, the Creator of all things, the Alpha and Omega, not only BECAME flesh but also died and resurrected from the dead never to die again.

You cannot become something that you've always been nor can you become anything and be immutable.

The manifestations and events of Christ's earthly life and death were temporal in order to reveal His righteous achievement and standing in eternal glory and Godly purpose.

This is your doctrine and as such begs the question. The veracity of your doctrine is what is being debated. If the Creator became anything then He is not immutable. If He is not immutable then Calvinism is false and all of it's distinctive precepts are in question, not the least of which is the self-contradictory, not to mention unbiblical, notion that God exists outside of time.

Further, it wouldn't help your case anyway because you say that God is immutable - period. Your doctrine doesn't teach that God changes temporarily!

So you believe Triune God died on the cross? What about the Son of Man, Jesus? Whose blood was shed from whose flesh?

God the Son died on the cross.

John chapter one states explicitly that it was the Creator who became flesh and Jesus calls Himself the Alpha and the Omega in Revelation 2.

Now there is but one God and just how the Trinity works and where one Member of it starts and the other stops isn't explained to us in scripture but regardless, it was God Who became flesh and Who died and Who rose to life again.


Clete

 

[genuineoriginal]

Calvinist’s believe man was created good.

Calvinists believe in Total Depravity.

THE FIVE POINTS OF CALVINISM Chapter 1: Total Depravity I must call your attention to some distinctions that have been made and have become increasingly popular. These distinctions are evidently intended to soften the truth of total depravity. There is, e.g., the distinction which is sometimes made between total depravity and absolute depravity. This distinction is intended to mean that while man is totally depraved, he is not absolutely depraved. The following quotation will serve to elucidate what is meant by this distinction. (It is taken from The Banner and is found in an article which is explaining the Canons of Dordt, especially Canons III & IV, Article 4.) The result of the fall is total depravity or corruption. By this is meant that every part of man is rendered corrupt. The Canons say that man "became involved in blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity, perverseness of judgment; became wicked, rebellious, obdurate in heart and will and impure in his affection." There was no part of his nature that was not affected by sin. The word "total" must not be taken in the absolute sense as though man is completely depraved. Man is not as bad as he can be. Article 4, which we hope to consider more fully later in this series, speaks of "glimmerings of natural light which remain in man since the fall." God does restrain the working of sin in the life of man on earth. And sinful man still has a sense of right and wrong. His corruption is total in the sense that there is no part of his being that is pure and holy; and the good he does is done for God and for His glory.​ In this quotation the distinction is made between total depravity and absolute depravity. Total depravity means that man is depraved in every part of his being. But while he is depraved in every part of his being, at the same time there remain in every part of his being remnants of good. Absolute depravity means that every part of his being is wholly bad. This distinction therefore is intended precisely to leave room for some good which man is able to perform.

​

 

[ttruscott]

Romans 5:19-21

Romans 5:19–21 (NKJV) 19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous. 20 Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, 21 so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace

Please consider:
Have you never noticed that the verb MAKE in Romans 5:19 is also translated as
• to appoint one to administer an office
• to set down as, constitute, to declare, show to be
• to show or exhibit one's self
• to come forward as
all of which mean the same thing as to make without using make to mean to be created that way by the disobedience of the one man. Rather, by becoming a human in Adam they were proven to be sinful; they were declared to be, shown to be, already sinners.

 

[ttruscott]

Which means the only option for you, Nang, is to reject that Jesus is immutable.

GOD argued with Abraham and offered to change HIS Mind about Sodom and Gomorrah so some change is NOT outside of HIS immutability. For the Son to be immutable and yet become human it only means that becoming human was within HIS nature from the git go and NOT a change, probably because humanness contains the image of GOD.

 

[ttruscott]

Is God the Author of Sin?

All expressions of the whole inherited sin blasphemy are to be rejected because they all attribute the creation of sin and evil people to GOD no matter how they use double-think to create their flim flam to avoid this obvious fact. Many statements are made that it is not true that HE creates evil people but no one can say how it is not true, sigh.

Do we know of ANY Church that doesn't rest upon this corrupt doctrine as a foundation?

 

[Nang]

Romans 5:19–21 (NKJV) 19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous. 20 Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, 21 so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace

Please consider:
Have you never noticed that the verb MAKE in Romans 5:19 is also translated as
• to appoint one to administer an office
• to set down as, constitute, to declare, show to be
• to show or exhibit one's self
• to come forward as
all of which mean the same thing as to make without using make to mean to be created that way by the disobedience of the one man. Rather, by becoming a human in Adam they were proven to be sinful; they were declared to be, shown to be, already sinners.

Yes. The word "make" in Romans 5:19 is used in a judicial sense. Adam sinned and was judged guilty of death for that original sin. However, because Adam represented the entire human race, that same sentence has been handed down to all his descendants. All men are conceived in sin and all men suffer death.

Jesus Christ being the last "Adam" represents the adopted "sons of God"; His spiritual church body. Through the righteousness and faithfulness of Jesus Christ, all His spiritual descendants are judged righteous by God. Through His sacrificial and vicarious death and resurrection, all His church is promised everlasting life with Him, and all of them will escape Judgement Day and the second death. John 3:16

 

[ttruscott]

He died, Nang! Has God always been dead? Is He dead right now?

He is termed dead because HIs living Spirit left His body to die. He did not change, only His body changed and then changed again when He resurrected...all of this is within HIS unchangeable immutability.

 

[Nang]

GOD argued with Abraham and offered to change HIS Mind about Sodom and Gomorrah so some change is NOT outside of HIS immutability. For the Son to be immutable and yet become human it only means that becoming human was within HIS nature from the git go and NOT a change, probably because humanness contains the image of GOD.

You have posted a very profound Truth. "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever."

 

[ttruscott]

So you believe Triune God died on the cross? What about the Son of Man, Jesus? Whose blood was shed from whose flesh?

Of course a Divine Person of the Trinity died when His body died - when He left His body for Sheol. That is the meaning of death - it refers to the corruption of the body when the living Spirit leaves it. The Son of Man IS the Divine Person of the Trinity whose blood was shed from His human body for us.

It can't be otherwise...

 

[Nang]

Of course a Divine Person of the Trinity died when His body died - when He left His body for Sheol. That is the meaning of death - it refers to the corruption of the body when the living Spirit leaves it. The Son of Man IS the Divine Person of the Trinity whose blood was shed from His human body for us.

It can't be otherwise...

Jesus Christ is unique, in that He is both God and Man. No other human being can claim the hypostatic union of the two natures/identities possessed by Jesus only.

Jesus died in His human flesh and overcame death by the power of His Divine Spirit . . proven by His ability to raise Himself from the tomb. Matthew 12:40; John 2:19

 

[ttruscott]

You are reading your doctrine into the text.

There is NO real exegesis ! unless doctrine about a verse is received as Paul received the truth from Jesus Himself in the light. All hermeneutics is by eisegesis, Calvin, Arminian, Catholic...all the theologies put their a priori beliefs into the the verses, even me, or we would all be in one accord.

 

[ttruscott]

Yes. The word "make" in Romans 5:19 is used in a judicial sense. Adam sinned and was judged guilty of death for that original sin. However, because Adam represented the entire human race, that same sentence has been handed down to all his descendants. All men are conceived in sin and all men suffer death.

Agreed in part EXCEPT the ONLY sentence passed to his progeny was the sentence of DEATH! All die in him because all are sinners as written, not because all inherited his sin which is NOT written because that makes GOD the Creator of evil people.

Jesus Christ being the last "Adam" represents the adopted "sons of God"; His spiritual church body. Through the righteousness and faithfulness of Jesus Christ, all His spiritual descendants are judged righteous by God. Through His sacrificial and vicarious death and resurrection, all His church is promised everlasting life with Him, and all of them will escape Judgement Day and the second death. John 3:16.

AMEN!!

 

[Clete]

All expressions of the whole inherited sin blasphemy are to be rejected because they all attribute the creation of sin and evil people to GOD no matter how they use double-think to create their flim flam to avoid this obvious fact. Many statements are made that it is not true that HE creates evil people but no one can say how it is not true, sigh.

Do we know of ANY Church that doesn't rest upon this corrupt doctrine as a foundation?

Well, Paul teaches us in Romans that we do inherit a sinful nature which he calls "the flesh" from Adam. Because the bible teaches that mankind fell in Adam and not in Eve and because of the way the incarnation Of Christ occurred, we can infer that this sinful nature is passed down through the father and not the mother. If that were not the case then Jesus would have inherited the flesh from Mary and would not have been a qualified penal substitution nor would his death been able to erase the curse which happened at the Tree thus allowing God to condemn men not for the sin nature they inherited from Adam but rather only for the sins which they themselves commit.

Clete

 

[Clete]

He is termed dead because HIs living Spirit left His body to die. He did not change, only His body changed and then changed again when He resurrected...all of this is within HIS unchangeable immutability.

Nope!

His Spirit didn't just seperated from His physical body but was it was also seperated from the Father (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) and went to the grave, a.k.a. Abraham's Bosom, the place of the righteous dead, just like every other righteous dead person since righteous Abel.

Besides, Jesus Himself states as plain as day...

Revelation 1:18
I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death.

Revelation 2:8
“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write, ‘These things says the First and the Last, who was dead, and came to life:


God became a man, He died and rose from the dead. Isn't that the very gospel itself? Why is it so hard to simpy believe it? Isn't it easier to simply take Jesus' word for it than to have to twist through some sort of covoluted doctrinal pretzel machine just to maintain the idea that God is immutable when just His conception inside Mary's womb smashes that doctrine to dust before you ever get to the death and resurection part of the gospel anyway?!


Clete

 

[Clete]

There is NO real exegesis ! unless doctrine about a verse is received as Paul received the truth from Jesus Himself in the light. All hermeneutics is by eisegesis, Calvin, Arminian, Catholic...all the theologies put their a priori beliefs into the the verses, even me, or we would all be in one accord.

This is an overstatement.

I agree that everyone brings biases to the reading a scripture but that doesn't mean that one cannot do exegesis nor accomplish any level of objective study of God's word. Good hermaneutical principles exist and are designed specifically for the purpose of limiting problems such as confirmation bias and they absolutely do help a great deal in that regard. To beleive otherwise is to throw up one's hands in surender to every wind of doctrine. There would be no reason for such a person to ever bother showing up on a debate forum or for ever bothering to open their mouths at all in an attempt to convince anyone of doctrinal error, regardless of the venue (and regardless of the error).

Besides, it wasn't exactly eisegesis that Nang was doing anyway. What she was doing was text book question begging/circular reasoning. Calvinism teaches that God exists outside of time because they believe the God is immutable, not the other way around. In other words, the doctrine of immutability is a premise of the doctrine of divine timelessness. If you flip it around and use the conclusion as a premise for the premise that the conclusion was based upon then the room starts spinning around and you end up falling over.

That doesn't prevent them (Cavlinists) from doing it though! They are the quickest there are of people who will throw rational thought right out the window in order to preserve their precious doctrine of immutability, which they learned from Augstine who learned it from Plato.

Clete

 

[Clete]

Jesus Christ is unique, in that He is both God and Man. No other human being can claim the hypostatic union of the two natures/identities possessed by Jesus only.

Jesus died in His human flesh and overcame death by the power of His Divine Spirit . . proven by His ability to raise Himself from the tomb. Matthew 12:40; John 2:19

One innocent human death is sufficient to pay for the life on one other human being, not billions or even two other human souls!

If God did not die, we are all doomed for it was the infinite value of God's own life that paid the price for our sin.

 

[Clete]

GOD argued with Abraham and offered to change HIS Mind about Sodom and Gomorrah so some change is NOT outside of HIS immutability. For the Son to be immutable and yet become human it only means that becoming human was within HIS nature from the git go and NOT a change, probably because humanness contains the image of GOD.

THIS IS NOT THE DOCTRINE OF IMMUTABILITY!!!!

This is not even Christianity!

God was not always human! God did not always have a physical body!

There was a time BEFORE God had ever grown inside of womb (or outside of a womb). There was a time before God had ever been hungry, or eaten, or had His belly full of home cooked food, or slept, or wept, or a thousand other things associated with being a human being. He most certainly had never been dead before and by extention had never been resurrected before!

Not only that but there are lots and lots of times throughout the scripture where God changes His mind. In fact, there's one whole book of the bible devoted to telling the story of one such incident!

Jonah 3:10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.​

---------------------

For that which is changed does not retain its own being; and that which can be changed, although it be not actually changed, is able not to be that which it had been; and hence that which not only is not changed, but also cannot at all be changed, alone falls most truly, without difficulty or hesitation, under the category of being. - Augustine - God’s Existence and Essence - Book V Chapter 2

"That which is accidental commonly implies that it can be lost by some change of the thing to which it is an accident. For although some accidents are said to be inseparable, which in Greek are called 7χ8ριστα, as the color black is to the feather of a raven; yet the feather loses that color, not indeed so long as it is a feather, but because the feather is not always. Wherefore the matter itself is changeable; and whenever that animal or that feather ceases to be, and the whole of that body is changed and turned into earth, it loses certainly that color also. Although the kind of accident which is called separable may likewise be lost, not by separation, but by change; as, for instance, blackness is called a separable accident to the hair of men, because hair continuing to be hair can grow white; yet, if carefully considered, it is sufficiently apparent, that it is not as if anything departed by separation away from the head when it grows white, as though blackness departed thence and went somewhere and whiteness came in its place, but that the quality of color there is turned and changed. Therefore there is nothing accidental in God, because there is nothing changeable or that may be lost. But if you choose to call that also accidental, which, although it may not be lost, yet can be decreased or increased, – as, for instance, the life of the soul: for as long as it is a soul, so long it lives, and because the soul is always, it always lives; but because it lives more when it is wise, and less when it is foolish, here, too, some change comes to pass, not such that life is absent, as wisdom is absent to the foolish, but such that it is less; – nothing of this kind, either, happens to God, because He remains altogether unchangeable." - Augustine - God’s Existence and Essence - Chapter 4​

That crap is hard to follow but what he is saying that it isn't just "in His essense" that God is unchangeable. It's BOTH in essense and accident that God "remains altogether unchangeable". (The word 'accident' is used in the philosphical sense of the term. It refers to any attribute that may or may not belong to a subject, without affecting its essence - source).

And before you tell me that Augustine wasn't a Calvinist - Calvinists are Augustinians, reformed Augustinians to be sure but it wasn't this portion of his doctrine that they rejected. On the contrary, they not only acknowledge it, they fully embrace it and defend it with nashing teeth!

First, God is immutable in His essence. His nature and being are infinite, and so, subject to no mutations. There never was a time when He was not; there never will come a time when He shall cease to be. God has neither evolved, grown, nor improved. All that He is today, He has ever been, and ever will be....

...He cannot change for the better, for He is already perfect; and being perfect, He cannot change for the worse. Altogether unaffected by anything outside Himself, improvement or deterioration is impossible. He is perpetually the same. He is altogether uninfluenced by the flight of time. There is no wrinkle upon the brow of eternity. Therefore His power can never diminish nor His glory ever fade.

Secondly, God is immutable in His attributes. Whatever the attributes of God were before the universe was called into existence, they are precisely the same now, and will remain so forever. Necessarily so; for they are the very perfections, the essential qualities of His being. Semper idem (always the same) is written across every one of them. His power is unabated, His wisdom undiminished, His holiness unsullied. The attributes of God can no more change than Deity can cease to be. - A.W. Pink​

Notice that Pink not only equates immutability with divinity itself but that he uses Plato's argument for immutability virtually verbatim...

Socrates: “It is universally true, then, that that which is in the best state by nature or art or both admits least alteration by something else.”

Adeimantus: “So it seems.”

Socrates: “But God, surely, and everything that belongs to God is in every way in the best possible state.” “Of course.” “From this point of view, then, it would be least of all likely that there would be many forms in God.”

Adeimantus: “Least indeed.”

Socrates: “But would he transform and alter himself?”

Adeimantus: “Obviously,” he said, “if he is altered.”

Socrates: “Then does he change himself for the better and to something fairer, or for the worse and to something uglier than himself?”

Adeimantus: “It must necessarily,” said he, “be for the worse if he is changed. For we surely will not say that God is deficient in either beauty or excellence.”

Socrates: “Most rightly spoken,” said I. “And if that were his condition, do you think, Adeimantus, that any one god or man would of his own will worsen himself in any way?”

Adeimantus: “Impossible,” he replied.

Socrates: “It is impossible then,” said I, “even for a god to wish to alter himself, but, as it appears, each of them being the fairest and best possible abides for ever simply in his own form.”

Adeimantus: “An absolutely necessary conclusion to my thinking."

Plato, Republic, Book 2​

Clete

 

[ttruscott]

Well, Paul teaches us in Romans that we do inherit a sinful nature which he calls "the flesh" from Adam.

Your interpretation and related doctrines are because the churches use eisegesis to interpret a couple of verses to claim they support their anti-holiness pov. Of course they agree because the Church makes sure the interpretation does not interfere with their created on earth doctrine.

 

[ttruscott]

Good hermaneutical principles exist and are designed specifically for the purpose of limiting problems such as confirmation bias and they absolutely do help a great deal in that regard. To beleive otherwise is to throw up one's hands in surender to every wind of doctrine.

You ignore the work of the Holy Spirit. I know it is frowned upon that people today talk to GOD and HE communicates back because the secular world has tainted all spiritual communication with accusations of psychosis but...this is where our understanding is supposed to come from! Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; of what a verse means. What someone figures a verse to means is meaningless...even if they are a bunch of political old men who all agree.

Far from surrendering, I stand against the most obvious blasphemies that the church is built upon as both unreasonable and not holy.