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 ...
Whew!!! You are one smart cookie! I got about 1/2 of that but enough that I stand amazed and awestruck at the mightiness, enormity and, most gratefully, the wisdom of our Creator. How thankful I am as well, that he not only created all but “stayed in touch” with his creation and actually LOVES us.
Thank you for your post!
Ok, if it's a cheap lawyer's question, why don't you ask me that question? I will give you a straight answer.
Ask me.
I may be a cheap lawyer but I can give a straight answer.
No, there are many critical steps. Election means that each critical step will happen for or apply to a particular person. For example, in truth do you really think Calvinists believe that Christ on the cross is not a critical part of salvation?
If elect, everything else is given you. If not, nothing can or will happen. Election is critical, the rest is, as you say, part of the package.
Yes, but that does not diminish the "criticalness" of any of the steps. All MUST happen, all WILL happen.
However, scripture, hundreds of times over, says believing is the critical step. If you believe, you are placed in Christ and receive everything. If you don’t, you won’t.
Believing is no less critical in Calvinism than you describe here. I completely agree with you that "If you believe, you are placed in Christ and receive everything. If you don’t, you won’t." I am fine with that statement, and all the verses amounting to as much.
Thus it is faith (a word that means one person believing in another) that gives us access (entry) to grace, as Paul explicitly states.
That would depend on your precise use of the word "grace" here. For example, I think a full Pelagian might well agree with every one of your words, but I don't think any of us (including you) would want anything to do with that. :)
God never says, “I came to save the elect”, or, “I came to give life, that they might believe”.
God says He came to save sinners. But He did not come to save all sinners since not all are saved and God is not a failure. So, which sinners? His sheep:
The sheep are God's elect.
Wow, kosta... You must have really hit a nerve. That’s one of nastier attacks I’ve seen on the religious forums.
Nonsense.
The perspective involved asserts all manner of things about God.
The nature of the assertions is rather integral to a particular pseudo-super-rationalist perspective, in my experience.
The nature of the assertions has been extensively and rather tediously going back and forth ad nauseum over reasons for and against certain ideations about God and the evidence for God; Christianity, Scripture etc. in the starkest and most intensely pointed terms.
Replying in kind may be tricky but is not to be avoided if one is serious about anything approaching an even-handed ‘dialogue.’
This is a philosophical/ religious/ spiritual/ cosmological/ reason/ thought-processes/ reality sort of discussion.
Talking about those aspects of reality necessarily involves . . . uhhhhh . . . those aspects of reality.
The other side seems happy to let the chips fall where they may in their presentation of their assertions.
It’s only, evidently, when the chips grow uncomfortable that the !!!!DEMAND!!!!! is issued that only the most sanitized assertions be allowed from the our side.
Color me underwhelmed.
Ok. If you were to follow all of God’s commands would you be sinless, holy and righteous?
No.
Now ask me the question I asked you.
Why not?
I’ll respond to your last post after you respond to mine.
Now ask me the question I asked you.
ok...ok...ok! I’ll ask you the question. lol.
“Who controls your fate?”
I believe in God. I don't have to prove it to anybody. It's my belief. I'm not so thick that I'd claim to "know" there is a God, because I realize God cannot be proven. If God could be proven, we'd all be believers - well... most of us. There's always going to the occasional wild cards.
Every single ridiculous argument you folks keep having with kosta revolves around this one issue. Just say you believe in God, and you're smart enough to understand God can neither be defined nor proven, and the discussion is over.
I think all of you are using the wrong plan of attack when attempting to "prove there is a God". Try using the comparative mythology of one of my heroes - Joseph Campbell. His book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" was all the "proof" I needed that there really is a God.
Because, as a descendant of Adam, you are born with a sin nature that puts you at enmity with God’ righteous nature. The commandments you seek to toss about as ‘doable’ are a short course definition of God’s nature ... God is not a liar, therefor he cannot lie. You on the other hand, bacuse you were bron with a sin nature, can lie ... and hold yourself righteous in your pride. If you were born with God’s nature, as Jesus was, you can be sinless. ANd that’s why He died for you and me, because we could not receive a sinless nature on our own.
Well that is all and good for us descendants but Adam was born without a sin nature so was he prior to his sin and would he had been had he not sinned been sinless, holy and righteous?
And he would still be alive ...
Worthy points . . . to a point . . . LOL.
I don’t recall my spending much time, if any, trying to “prove” God.
I’m more interested in the factors that contribute to someone taking a pseudo-super-rationalist perspective to begin with . . . and doggedly sticking to it regardless of the irrational contradictions entailed.
God.
“And he would still be alive ...” and holy and righteous?
Instead of playing games, why don’t you just state what you are trying to trick others into saying, or denying so you can jump on them and show yourself ‘approved’?
I’m not playing a game nor am I looking for an opportunity to jump anyone. I’m merely using a Socratic method to work through the logic to see what results from our investigation.
I would think the answer is quite obvious that Adam was righteous and holy prior to sinning. God gave some conditions to remain righteous and holy and as long as those conditions were met then Adam was righteous and holy.
I would assume you would agree that those conditions still exist and if it were possible to meet all the commands then one would be righteous and holy.
So back to the discussion at hand are God’s commands the same as God’s will?
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