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[Kosta to Dr. E.:] Sounds to me as if we have a vocabulary problem here. Being partial, dear doctor or whatever you are, is a negative characteristic in the English language. It is rather synonymous with being one-sided, unfair, prejudiced, and unjust.

Ah, perhaps we are nearing a breakthrough. You are saying that Biblical "partiality" is synonymous with the English language terms "one-sided, unfair, prejudiced, and unjust". The KEY is that all of those English language terms are from the human perspective. So, you would say that God is impartial means that God is not unfair, IN HUMAN TERMS, etc. The Apostolic position is that God offers every man a "fair" chance at a grace plus works salvation IN HUMAN TERMS, etc. Somehow, some way, that God's ways are not man's ways does not apply to the Apostolic salvation model. For that model, God MUST adopt human standards of one-sidedness, fairness, prejudice, and justice.

This is a big disagreement among us. We would say that it is perfectly fair for God to choose whom among His creation He wants to be in Heaven. Apostolics would say that would be unfair UNLESS He gave everyone an equal shot at being chosen. Those are purely human standards, and in THIS case they are wrong because they limit God's sovereignty.

Those are purely human standards, and in THIS case they are wrong because they limit God's sovereignty

Don't you get that God LIMITS HIS OWN SOVEREIGNTY?

Look to the cross, one with the corpus on it. You may begin to understand what "divine condescension" means.

Regards

Actually, we argue along the lines that, given all of Scripture, it wouldn’t fit with what God has told us about our purpose and our relationship with Him that He wants us to have.

We really aren’t arguing about ‘fair’ - I’d say that that was an interesting side discussion - we are arguing about man’s purpose and man’s instructions as related to us by God. We are saying that man is instructed to reach out for God’s saving Grace, and all things come from that. Reformed doctrine says that it doesn’t matter if man reaches out or not, the Grace is put into him, and then all things come from that.

We also argue about what free will comprises. We believe that man is singly predestined to heaven unless he refuses God and then is rightly Judged to hell. I am unable to understand what the Reformed believe about free will because of the apparent variation in beliefs, but the statement that sticks with me is that nothing that man does matters.