Well, I know I don’t have time tonight to reply to your entire post, but I’ll make a small dent...
“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...”
Since I reject Pelagius as do all other Arminians, of course. No Arminian argues that we are born free from sin and can come to God on our own. Arminius argued that it is God’s grace reaching down to us that makes any response possible. The question is not, “Can we find/gain approval from God on our own?”, but, “When God reaches to us, can we respond to Him?”
The Calvinist says no, because we are “dead”. The Arminian says yes, because we see that dead means separated and alienated, as with the Prodigal Son, not incapable of response. We also note the use of words like blind, lost, sick, captives, etc describing our pre-salvation state, none of which imply we cannot respond to God’s offer.
“However, you introduce a Pelagian notion of free will...”
Nope. To repeat what God said to Cain just after the fall of man:
6The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? 7 If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”
That is God, not Pelagius, saying Cain had a choice to make.
“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.”
Nope. If God chose to do it that way, who could argue? But God presented a different plan: whosoever believes. It was God’s choice to offer salvation to who ever believes, not mine - and who am I to argue?
But if God commands men to repent when He knows they cannot, He is being dishonest. When God breathed, “...that by believing you may have life in his name”, he means that by believing you may have life in his name, not that by being given life, you’ll be able to believe.
There is nothing subtle or complex about that argument. Life follows belief, not belief following life. That is the promise of God, and He will not break it. God’s choice, not mine.
“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.”
Well, because of the parable of the Prodigal Son, when the “dead” son comes to his sense. Because Jesus calls us lost, and a lost man is not dead. Because Jesus calls us sick, and a sick man is not dead. Because Jesus calls us blind, and a blind man can want to see.
If the only description of us prior to salvation was “dead”, I’d agree with you. But we need to look at all of scripture, not just 20 or 30 verses. I pointed out Genesis 4, but it continues thru the entire scripture - men are presented as making real choices to follow God (at God’s initiation) or to reject his offer.
“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.”
Exactly. You (and I) were prisoners, unable to free ourselves. But God, in His Grace, died for us and offers us salvation if we just believe his word. Although scripture speaks of us as the body of Christ, try thinking of Jesus as a ship. God has said the ship SS Jesus is headed to heaven, and anyone on it will be saved from the world and taken to heaven. All one needs to do is believe and accept your berth. If you do, God promises to take you to heaven. If you don’t, then you’ll be destroyed. No one saves themselves, but God offers the rescue and does the work - all we need to do is believe his offer.
I’ll try to discuss Romans 9-11 tomorrow, time allowing. I thank you again for the polite and scripture based discussion.
placemarker
In what way do you reject Pelagius? Because he, like you, taught a “prevenient grace,” a grace that precedes and enables but does not secure a favorable response. I am having real trouble seeing the difference between your position and his. Elucidate please.
The Calvinist says no, because we are “dead”. The Arminian says yes, because we see that dead means separated and alienated, as with the Prodigal Son, not incapable of response. We also note the use of words like blind, lost, sick, captives, etc describing our pre-salvation state, none of which imply we cannot respond to God’s offer.
As to the first, yes, there are other metaphors, blindness, sickness, captivity, etc. But if we accept Scripture as the whole counsel of God, it would seem a poor strategy to isolate the various sin descriptors one from another, as if they were mutually exclusive. They are not. Blindness reflects our inability to see truth. Sickness reflects our vulnerability to decay and demise, captivity reflects our inability to act as free persons, lostness reflects our lack of a moral or spiritual compass. All these things are true, yet none of these things detracts at all from our deadness; rather, they explain it.
What is deadness anyway? It is the absence of animating force, the lack of internal cellular or organic activity, other than decay and consumption by parasites. That is an awful picture of our condition under sin, but God tells us the truth even when it isn’t easy to accept.
Furthermore, even if Ephesians 2:1 and Colossians 2:13 are read as strictly forensic, what is the effective difference? Under the law, a final adjudication rendered at the highest level of appeal cannot be undone, even by the judge who rendered the sentence, a concept called Res Judicata, “the thing is decided.” Then, like Esau, we might in our rational, uncontaminated minds (if only we had such) come before the Judge pleading for a second chance, but to no avail, because the sentence has already been issued. Unless another should stand in our place to take that punishment, we face certain demise. And if that Other should stand in our place, and take our punishment, there remains no more punishment for us to receive, and our transition from legal deadness to legal life is complete, because that Other took our punishment and left us to face no condemnation.
But, as I pointed out in my previous post, Paul does not leave us wondering whether his “death” reference is strictly forensic, as he specifically ties it to both our being under condemnation and to having the nature of those who live in enmity to God under the impulse of their own lusts. Again, your effort to separate those qualities by making them mutually exclusive is unfounded, and cannot and should not dislodge the ordinary power of the word “death” in the foregoing passages.
Furthermore, I hope you will forgive the Calvinist for seeing our new birth in Christ as nothing less than resurrection, because Paul specifically encourages the analogy, because those same “death” passages where you attempt to lessen the force of “death” also refer to our resurrection. Would you have our “death” be forensic, and our “life” be transformational? By what law of hermeneutics may you arbitrarily treat the two symmetrical halves of the same metaphor by a different rule? I am sorry, but that is an imposition on the text too obviously alien to the intent of the writer.
That is God, not Pelagius, saying Cain had a choice to make.
I hope you read that part of my earlier post where I explain that presentation with choices does not imply an absolute freedom to make those choices. Choosing derives from the nature of the chooser. Whether an Ethiopian, a Leopard, or a sinner, some characteristics are present and color every choice made. In choosing wrong, choosing sin is still sin. The deed is still evil, even if it flows from an evil desire that overwhelms any impulse to good. And God still presents humankind with such choices, as much to prove his case against us as anything else. He says we are sinners, and whenever we are presented with moral choices, unless he should intervene, we choose as sinners always choose. We do not seek God, by nature. God has said so, and we contradict him at our peril. See Romans 3:11.
“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.”
Nope. If God chose to do it that way, who could argue? But God presented a different plan: whosoever believes. It was God’s choice to offer salvation to who ever believes, not mine - and who am I to argue?
True, and if God represented that to be the case in Scripture, I would defend that position. That is not what Scripture teaches, when taken as a whole.
But if God commands men to repent when He knows they cannot, He is being dishonest. When God breathed, “...that by believing you may have life in his name”, he means that by believing you may have life in his name, not that by being given life, you’ll be able to believe.
And there you have it, the very thing that concerns me. God cannot lie, I am sure we agree. Yet he holds Pharaoh accountable for persecuting Israel, despite the fact he hardened him, and raised him up for this very purpose. God does not stand in relation to man the same way that one man stands in relation to another man. He is our Creator. He knows infallibly that the Pharisees are not his sheep, and will therefore not believe, and tells them so while they still walk among the living. Yet they clearly had a choice, and their choice was wrong; they chose the wrong thing, yet they were free to act according to their sinful nature, and so remain accountable for their sin. Yet again, like Pharaoh, God raised them up, with Pilate, to crucify Christ, an act of monstrous evil that was nevertheless essential to our salvation, for without their hardness of heart we would have no Savior.
I understand this is a hard concept, but God is God, and his ways past finding out. We know clearly what he has done to save us, but we cannot and dare not accuse him of dishonesty for putting choices to men when he knows full well how reliable men are in acting out their sinful nature.
There is nothing subtle or complex about that argument. Life follows belief, not belief following life. That is the promise of God, and He will not break it. God’s choice, not mine.
If you say so. Reminds me of CS Lewis’ comment about the simplicity of a chair. Sure it is simple, if all you want to do is sit in the chair. If you want to understand how it came to be and remains a chair, then you have a much more difficult analysis on your hands. God has told us to believe, and in so doing we will experience eternal life. You and I are quibbling the first logical events of that personal “big bang” moment, but no believer is worrying about that when they first come to faith. We experience things in time because we must, because we are finite and time-bound.
But God invented time. He stands in a different relationship to time than we do. If he says he chose us in the beloved before the world began, then that’s what he means, even if our tiny little minds can’t grasp it. Part of faith is saying, “God, I’m not sure how you did all this, but I trust you anyway.” Calvinists and Arminians (or “Armenians,” if you like) both often run aground on this very point, by trying to force “logically complete” systems onto Scripture, when Scripture is not designed to conform to the limits of our embarrassingly small minds. We cannot force-fit our human limitations onto God; rather, we must, as a matter of faith, let God simply say what he says and we believe it, even if it leaves us with a few difficult conundrums.
try thinking of Jesus as a ship
Interestingly, I believe it was AW Tozer who concocted that old ship analogy. Interesting as it is, I don’t buy it because I don’t have to. Scripture does not obligate me to accept corporate election to non-salvific benefits as mutually exclusive with individual election unto salvific benefits. Romans 9-11 is a detailed apostrophe in response to the question of the security of individual salvation Paul has raised in the latter portion of Romans 8. The whole sequence is designed to show that the two types of election are NOT mutually exclusive, and therefore Christians may rest secure in the unbreakable certainty of their individual relationship with God, who will be faithful to preserve them in the love of Christ as individuals, even if the national election of Israel has been temporarily subsumed to the interests of the Gentiles.
Whereas the ship analogy is that very kind of imposition on the text which you say you reject. Analogies are great as long as they do not add to or subtract from the truth being taught by God in words of his own choice in Scripture. See Revelation 22:18-19. The ship analogy corporatizes salvific election by obliterating individual salvific election. Tozer was wrong. And Tozer was limited in other ways, as we all are, of course. My dad had us attending Tozer’s church for many years (Chicago area). He couldn’t or wouldn’t drive a car. I don’t know if it was a physical or a psychological issue, but my dad believed it was psychological. Some sort of fear, perhaps? None but God knows. In any event, Tozer was always just another man to me, and his analogies, like any other mortal’s, must survive the stringent test proposed by Luther, “But what does the word say?”
And to what is our personal, individual salvation likened in the word? Resurrection. That’s Calvinism in a word, and in the word.
Peace,
SR