Replies

Your argument from the image of God is defective on two counts. First, there are many attributes of God we do not share, despite being made in his image. We are not infinite in power or wisdom. And even if our will is free in your sense of the word, it is not nearly as free as his, due if nothing else to our finitude, let alone the problem of sin.

Second, no one can reasonably argue that the fall had no impact on that image of God in us. You have chosen to define it primarily in terms of legal effect, and that effect is certainly valid. We are forensically guilty as children of Adam. But the doctrine of Pelagius, that all souls start out essentially fresh and untainted with sin personally, has been rejected by the church at large for millennia, and for good reason. You doubtless know the drill, and I am sure you have your response package ready, but I will recite a few of the typical passages dealing with the limits of the unregenerate spirit here for the record:

Jer 13:23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.

Rom 8:6-8 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.

John 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

Do keep in mind your own rule. We both claim to be adverse to introducing things into the text that the text does not clearly support. However, you introduce a Pelagian notion of free will, which he may well have adopted from a combination of Greek philosophy and Celtic pagan theories of humans overcoming supernatural limitations, and when you do so, you do so with no textual basis for linking this classical philosophical free will concept with passages that describe sin-tainted individuals being presented with choices.

For example, all those verses that reference our choice are all considered true by Calvinists as much as by you, as far as the text will take it. The question is not whether we are presented with choices, or whether we are morally obligated to choose good over evil. We are. So we agree that far.

Your extra-textual assumption, however, appears to be that it would be unfair of God to present an obligation to one who was unwilling to fulfill it, if that unwillingness was an immutable natural characteristic of that person. I am asking you to check that assumption at the door and try to see the text for what it is, the story of what happened when a particular individual was presented with a choice, and what they did. None of these passages prove the a priori existence of a faculty of choice that could operate independently of the nature of the person exercising that choice. That is a novel, complex, and extra-textual surmise, and the truth or falsity of it cannot be demonstrated by stories that do not directly address it.

Furthermore, such a faculty for choice unaffected by the nature of the chooser is something not even true of God himself, let alone God’s finite creatures:

2 Timothy 2:13 If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

God does not act contrary to his own nature, and neither do we. Otherwise there is no sense in being something, if you cannot predictably act like it.

Titus 1:2 In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;

So God cannot lie. He, like us, acts according to his nature. His nature being perfect holiness and righteousness, he cannot lie. We can lie. What does that tell you?

Again, reminding you of your rule against extra-textual insertions, I ask you to show me where our being dead in trespasses and sins is strictly limited to the forensic sense you prefer. I do not deny that legal effect, but the Scriptures are resplendent with the personal effects of our sin nature as well, and I myself can testify to the inescapability of that nature until God came to me one day with an unexpected mercy. Therefore, one would expect such limitation as you suggest would be evident in Scripture, i.e., there should be some combination of passages which clearly show that, despite our legal trouble, we were and are totally unaffected as to our nature in consequence of Adam’s sin. However, if we were affected at all as to our nature, if any degree of bias toward sin was introduced, how would we be able to then act contrary to our own nature? Would not that make us more powerful than God, being able to do something he can’t, act outside our own nature?

Therefore, I am forensically a sinner, true, but I act like one too. And many times in my life I was presented with choices, presented with the Gospel, and consistently chose poorly. I was than sinner of Romans 3:

Rom 3:10-18 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood: Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes.

That passage is not theoretical to me. I lived it. Maybe he’s not talking about you, but he’s definitely talking about me If you had no taint of sin and feel as though you came to God under your own power, then you were far better off than me. I was an absolute prisoner of my sinful nature. I could regale you with details but they would not be edifying to either of us. It is a life better forgotten and lost in the sea of God’s forgiveness.

Eph 2:1-3 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

Notice Paul does not focus strictly on the forensic culpability, but on the personal corruption, in his discussion of being “dead” in our trespasses. The legal and the personal are fused here, a single reality viewable from both perspectives without diminishing either perspective. The death spoken of has us, in times past, walking about with a spirit of disobedience, a lifestyle of lust, driven by our nature as children of wrath. Being spiritually dead wasn’t just a legal sentence; it defined us right down to the core; it is who we really were before Christ redeemed us, revived us. For me to rewrite that in some prettified fashion as merely legal would require me to unremember my own past and the utter helplessness of it.

Hence the necessity of God’s intervention.

Now, in that regard, you would like to introduce a concept of corporate election, and while that may be appealing on first blush, I advise you once again of your own rule, that we should avoid extra-textual insertions to the degree possible.

Corporate election, as you are describing it, is just such an intrusion upon the text. It is a device used to avoid the uncomfortable truth that God not only has the right and the power to draw some and not draw others into the fold as his own sheep, but that he has actually done so. However, your theory cannot be supported by the text, and in its modern incarnation is largely a product of the “New Perspective on Paul” movement, not a product of sound Biblical hermeneutics.

Consider for example one of the most hotly contested passages in Scripture:

Rom 9:11-13 (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;) It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

Now a good “corporate electionist” would say that the Jacob versus Esau choice was clearly national, not individual. Cf. Malachi 1:2. But that would be an odd imposition on the text because if you look at the introductory text to chapter 9, Paul is using Jacob versus Israel to explain the exact opposite of corporate election, how Israel, though it was chosen as a nation by God, nevertheless could not claim that all Israelites were of the seed of Abraham, children of the promise. He was using the example precisely for the purpose of *excluding* corporate election with respect to Israel, in favor of the spiritual Israel, the children of God who come into being through the Abrahamic promise.

(The Malachi reference does not dislodge this view, but reinforces it, in that Paul’s use the original event of God choosing Jacob is to show God really choosing between two individuals, one a child of the flesh of Isaac, one a child of the Abrahamic promise. The idea that the nation of Israel would remain the permanent, corporate beneficiary of that one early choice is exactly what Paul is refuting. The choice was lineal, not corporate, though it did bring benefit to fleshly Israel for a time. It is the promise in Abraham that matters, the election that results in personal faith, not salvation by natural birth, but salvation of individuals without regard to national origin, or gender, or intellect, or wealth, who, taken together, are the true, spiritual Israel.)

Eph 1:4-7 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;

Note here how Paul includes himself, as “us” and “we.” Clearly he considers himself among the elect, and the only way he could acknowledge that fact in combination with the choice being made before the foundation of the world is if he was also acknowledging that he was personally, individually included in that ancient choice. There is no mention of “tribal” grouping here, a master set into which one might enter or from which one might exit at will. That might be your belief, but it is a modern interjection, and this text simply does not say that; you are introducing it to resolve a difficulty you have with the personal, individual election of Paul (and the others at Ephesus), which you regard as violative of your a priori theory of a nature-independent free will. That is as extra-textual as it gets.

Is that how you understand the other dependent clauses in the statement, that we are not personally and individually accepted in the beloved, redeemed through his blood, forgiven of sins, or beneficiaries of the riches of his grace, *as individuals*? But only that we can sign in or sign out of the Gospel Borg on all that whenever we like? Then who will be secure, even in Heaven? Now I’m forgiven, now I’m not, now the blood washes away my many, many sins, now it doesn’t, the stain returns? Now he has accepted me and now he doesn’t? What a nightmare! And all based on a property of random choice that is wholly independent of my nature, whether good or evil? A brave theory on your part, but the text doesn’t teach it, and I am so glad of that;

Nor does the following passage support your innovative (I dare say too innovative) “corporate election” solution to the unfairness-of-election problem:

2 John 1:1-2 The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth; and not I only, but also all they that have known the truth; For the truth’s sake, which dwelleth in us, and shall be with us for ever.

John here, as an Apostle, writes to a specific person whom he calls out as “elect.” But as if he knows you and I will one day discuss this dear woman long into the future here on FR, he adds this startling statement, that the truth, which dwells in us, will stay with us forever. This is too specific to be written off as mere group talk, not to mention the fact that if we rewrote conditionals and depersonalizations into the text to suit your theory it would hold little if any comfort, and would not have the ring of a confident, personal assertion in a private letter that it does in the Greek (See A.T.Robertson on the word order in this verse).

But what, you have asked, about all those passages about Jesus finding faith in others? Please begin by recalling that Jesus emptied himself of the divine glory and humbled himself to become one of us:

Philippians 2:5-8 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

And all that Jesus knew, epistemologically speaking, he received at the sole discretion of the Father:

John 8:28 Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.

That included many things, but did not, for example, include specific knowledge of when his own visible return in glory would occur:

Mark 13:32 But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

Therefore, if he did not know this critical fact concerning his own person, why should it be surprising that there would be other facts that he acquired along the way as we do? Those that he needed to know, God revealed to him; those that he would learn via experience, he would acquire at the time experienced; those he would not know till sitting at the right hand of the Father in glory, he would not know till then.

Furthermore, as I have not stated repeatedly, identifying a gift as belonging to the one to whom it was given is legally, morally, logically appropriate. It does nothing to dislodge the principle that it was nevertheless a gift that did not originate with the recipient.

Based on the foregoing two principles, it is impossible to use Jesus’ discovery of faith in others as ground certain that the faith so found was not a gift of the Father, and as I have already cited many other passages which indicate that it is, the burden of proof is, and remains, on you to find a passage showing that faith is something not created by God.

On 1 Corinthians 4:7 (and by analogy Peter’s confession of faith), you contend that only revelation is something a man might have received of God, that faith is independent of revelation or God’s choices about what and to whom he reveals Gospel truth. While I understand the importance of using context to limit potential meanings, you do know that a general principle may be cited in proving up a specific instance. Paul is telling them they didn’t bring anything to the table, how much less should they boast on what particular Bible teacher they follow? And it is stated as a general principle, precisely because it is so open-ended. Paul is telling them, look, tell me what you have that you didn’t get from somewhere or someone else? No answer? OK, then why are you bragging about which teacher you follow?

When I was born, did my dna come from me, or my parents? When I saw my first ice-cream cone, did my understanding of what it was and why it was desirable come from me, or the world as God set it around me? When I first heard of Moses, Jonah, and Elijah in Sunday School, did I end up in that class by pure randomness, or by the hand of God, who orders all things according to the counsel of his own will?

Ephesians 1:11 In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will:

And that, again, goes to the Calvinist view of God, that he not only can exercise power that overwhelms our finite and sin-tainted sense of fairness, but that he in fact has done so, that part of faith is trusting in the inherent goodness of God, even when his acts do not square with our fleshly senses. Cf. All of Job, for example.

Or what of Abraham? I guarantee you, if it had been me taking that walk to Mount Moriah, every fiber of my being would have been in unrelenting rebellion against the prospect of offering my son up as a sacrifice. He had waited so long, yearned with such passion, to have that son, and now God seemed ready to take him away. Impossibly unfair. Yet that is the benchmark of Abrahamic faith, to surrender to God, to believe in God, even when it seems impossibly unfair to mortal reason.

So when as a young man I am hearing the Gospel preached for the umpteenth time, and finally I awake from my stupor and see the cross of Jesus for what it is, and my desperate need of forgiveness and reconciliation, how did I come to that moment, and not some other, more deserving person half-way around the world, in some country where the Gospel has yet to be heard? Who laid all the brick on the road to that crisis? Do we, as Christians, wish to attribute that to the random froth of the universe, the chaos theory of salvation? Or do we, in Scripture, see a God who does indeed hold sinful mortals accountable while at the same time not surrendering his power to determine the course of events in their lives?

John 15:5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

2 Corinthians 3:5 “We are not sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves,”

For example, is it not unfair that Pilate should be held as being “against the Lord,” when the crucifixion of Jesus was of all events the most indisputably predetermined event in human history? How unfair is that? Yet there it is:

Acts 4:24-28 And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said, Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is: Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.

All of this rage against God and his plan of redemption, yet all that gathered against him were so gathered “to do whatsoever thy [God’s] hand and thy [God’s] counsel determined before to be done.” No randomness to those events, and yet no lack of accountability either:

Act 2:22-23 Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain:

So why should we surmise randomness where God’s word repeatedly has spoken to us of God’s careful planning for our redemption? Would that not be the very thing of which you warn Calvinists, to not introduce ideas that have no support of Scripture? I would argue that Calvinism has the appeal that it does because it alone among the soteriological belief systems of Christianity accounts best for the Scriptures that posit human moral responsibility coexisting with an all powerful, all good God who does what he wants to do and no one can stop him or succeed in challenging him.

As for Jesus chiding his disciples for their lack of faith, that is perfectly reasonable for him to do, as they needed to know they lacked faith. That is always part of the process for acquiring what you don’t have that you need. Someone must tell you you are coming up short. So it is Jesus who is here giving them the foundation for faith by instructing their reason. That they understood he was the only solution to their lack of faith is evident in their plea to him in another place:

Luke 17:5 And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.

Now he did not rebuke them for their inquiry, but immediately set out to show they what great things they could accomplish if they had faith; so by reason instructing them and giving them in that very act the framework for a greater faith, literally answering their prayer before their eyes.

I also find it instructive that these Apostles, pillars of the faith as they would later be called, felt their lack of faith most sharply in the context of Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness, which teaching immediately preceded their prayer to him. They knew by inward reflection that the kind of never-ending forgiveness Jesus was commanding was something beyond their ability and experience, and that they would have to have greater faith to live to that higher standard.

Yet what does Jesus tell them? That if they had any faith at all they could do what seemed impossible to them, they could live to that higher standard, and yet, even in the doing of it, even in the exercise of this greater faith, they would only be doing what their master had commanded them to do, and so could not consider themselves “profitable servants,” i.e., servants who had brought something of their own to the table.

As for the order of salvation, you confuse temporal order with logical order. Riddle me this verse:

John 10:26 But you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep, as I said to you.

What is the causal order? Does belief come before sheepness, or sheepness before belief? Stay with the text. The Pharisees did not believe because they were not Jesus’ sheep. Nothing in the order of salvation is disrupted by believing that God gives faith and that faith is used to believe God. The giving and the using are natural reciprocals of one another. That we try to parse the timing of it by using words like “before” and “after” are reflective more of our own limitations as time-bound creatures than anything else. From our perspective, we are told to believe, and that if we do, we will live and inherit all the blessings that accompany faith, and that is not a whit contrary to Calvinist teaching. The only question is what makes one person to differ from another. Some variation in the cosmic chaos that makes me see and believe and leaves another blind? Whether you like it or not, that is your explanation, because anything more than that is determinism, and that can never be, though God himself should write it:

Acts 13:48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.

No Calvinist worth his salt will deny that God ordains both means and ends. These Gentiles were surely incentivized to believe, as you say, having heard the word, and been preached to concerning the benefits of salvation and the terror of the Lord to those who rebel. And yet what, in the preceding verse, goes logically before belief? “Ordained (or “appointed” if you prefer) is passive in the Greek, i.e., they do not initiate their own appointment. Stick to the text, according to your own rule, and it will faithfully guide you to the truth.

As for your idea that if Jesus is the author and perfector of our faith, we have nothing ourselves to do, you again resort to eliminating means simply because the ends are certain. Yet that defies the very concept of prophecy itself. All things that God determines to occur will occur, but so will all the logical and temporal precedents that lead to the prophesied event. If Jesus is the author of our faith, he will lead us to that point where it becomes truly our own, and he will not then abandon us to the waves of the tempest but will continually come out to us in the storm and settle our faith and give us himself to fix upon as we walk on the water. He does not just put yellow stickies on various dates in our future and hope we get there while he wanders off to do something else. He is God, he can do it all, guide us all the way home, through every event in our lives making us wiser and richer in the riches of his grace as we slip ever closer to the heavenly shores.

As for the absence of the word “our,” the truth obtained stands well without it. If Jesus authors faith and brings it to perfection, then surely your faith and mine can only be a subset of that divine process, as there are no competing manufacturers.

As for the word “Archegon,” here translated “Author,” it appears elsewhere in Scripture and usage comparison would be beneficial here:

In Acts 3:15, Jesus is called the “Archegon of life,” the Prince of Life. Again, this could be either limited exclusively to his resurrection, or it could comprehend his resurrection as a demonstration of his absolute power to create and sustain life. You can draw your own inferences with respect to faith.

In Acts 5:31, he is “Archegon and Savior,” rendered Prince and Savior, jurisdictionally empowered to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness (but how can he grant repentance if that is solely man’s jurisdiction? Perhaps another time …).

That, when taken together with the writer of Hebrew’s amazingly high view of Jesus, would not reduce his status as “Archegon” to mere “archetype,” which your interpretation tends to do, taking almost a more naturalistic, historical approach, rather than seeing Jesus as living and dynamically available to those looking up to him, as the Prince of the realm, with all power to originate life, whether physical or spiritual, as encompassed within his royal jurisdiction:

Hebrews 1:1 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high …

So, if he is the Prince of faith, he is the absolute governor over it. Hmmm…

BTW, faith is not belief without proof, as you have stated. That is a recipe for psychosis, without further qualification. The Scripture does not use such a definition, but rather says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is a kind of proof, a connecting of God’s certainty with our perception; like Peter, we do see the reality of Jesus being the Messiah, even if we do not always hold it perfectly:

Now concerning Peter:

Luke 22:32 But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.”

Please note that your notion of Peter’s faith failing because Jesus prayer doesn’t affect it is temporally bound; you think that because Jesus’ prayer was not answered in Peter’s immediate future, therefore Jesus prayer had no effect on Peter’s faith. Yet not only did Jesus’ prayer work, but it ran exactly according to the terms Jesus prophesied, for Jesus did not tell Peter that his faith would survive now and be strong now during the impending crisis, but that when it was over, Peter would definitely return and be in a position to strengthen his brethren. Note it is not posited as “if you return,” but “when you return.” The gifts and calling of God are without repentance, i.e., incapable of being turned back.

Furthermore, the only prayer of Jesus for which we have Scriptural evidence that God said “no” is Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, the one thing that he came to do, that God had ordained from before time began, that was so overwhelming when confronted in person that Jesus asked whether God might remove this cup from him. God clearly said no. I am unwilling to surmise that any other prayer of Jesus failed unless given an unmistakable textual mandate for doing so, and you have not provided such.

There is more to say, but for your relief as well as mine, I’ll acknowledge we’ve gone on a bit long here, so I’ll quit for now. Perhaps we can continue on a more focused basis with smaller, specific chunks of argument. Proving up an entire system in a single post is quite wearying. But it’s up to you.

Peace,