Dikaioumenoi
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- Jun 29, 2016
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I'm not being eristic. The problem isn't "poor wording"; it's that you have consistently blurred two distinct categories: the generation of capacity and the exercise of that capacity. Your latest reply continues that confusion, as I show below.
If we agree that the enablement itself is infallibly successful, and your concern is only with whether the enabled person later acts on that capacity, then you have granted the point I originally made about ἑλκύω. The verb denotes the Father's decisive transition of a person from inability to ability. You cannot affirm the unfailing success of that transition while denying that the verb carries a sense of decisive movement. Your concern -- that the enabled person may or may not act upon the ability -- is something that ἑλκύω simply does not address.
So if the transition from incapacity to capacity is unfailing, then there is no theological reason to dilute ἑλκύω with a sense like "appeal to." A forceful, effective reading of the verb is entirely compatible with your view that the later exercise of the granted capacity is resistible, because John 6:44 attributes the verb to the Father's successful production of ability, not to the question of whether that ability is subsequently exercised.
This is why the semantic debate over ἑλκύω is ultimately irrelevant to the question of irresistible grace (which has been the whole point I have been trying to press regarding ἑλκύω). It cannot overturn the Calvinist argument; it can only weaken your own view. If ἑλκύω is made non-decisive, then the Father's enablement becomes fallible, implying that salvation may not even be possible. If you deny that, then you should accept the decisive movement the verb conveys and focus the resistibility discussion where it actually belongs: on the syntax and context beyond the verb itself.
No, you brought this up, not me. I may have initiated the exchange, but I was responding to your claim in post #18 that the verb means "to draw, to appeal to, to coax, to prompt, to inform, to grace, to call, to knock on our door." That cluster of senses for the Greek term ἑλκύω simply has no lexical footing. My position does not stand or fall on the meaning of ἑλκύω, as I have repeatedly clarified.
The verb does denote force. But you're so concerned about jumping ahead to another issue that you're failing to recognize that granting this does not pose a problem for your view. The semantic core of ἑλκύω is a decisive movement from one position to another. But what is that change of position, in John 6:44? It is not from "able to come" --> "actually comes." What ἑλκύω concerns is movement from "unable to come" to "now able to come." The verb answers οὐδεὶς δύναται, which is a description of personal incapacity to do something. If that movement ("inability" --> "ability") is not decisive and infallible, then the implication is that the Father attempts to make it possible for someone to come to Christ, but that attempt -- at enablement -- is not necessarily successful, leaving open the possibility that salvation is unreachable.
"No one is able to fly unless given wings." The giving of wings does not itself guarantee that one will use them, but that has no bearing on whether the act of giving was successful. The transition from wingless to winged is decisive; the later question of whether one actually flies is a separate issue. So arguing that "giving" does not guarantee flying does nothing to show that the giving itself was non-decisive. It only confuses the success of the enabling act with the later exercise of the enabled capacity. This is why the definition you provided for ἑλκύω does not work. What it concerns (to use the analogy) is the giving of wings -- the granting of an ability -- not the use of them. That giving/drawing marks a decisive transition from one state to another. Incapacity --> capacity. The verb in John 6:44 does not govern whether the capacity is actually used; only that if and when it is given, the giving of it is successful.
And as I have repeatedly pointed out, this is not the issue. I have nowhere argued that ability requires subsequent action. The problem has been that ἑλκύω does not refer to that subsequent action. What it refers to in John 6:44 is the granting of the ability itself! So when you argue that the term means "to appeal to" or "to prompt," and not decisive movement, you are implying that the granting of the ability to come is not guaranteed.
So your "answer" that "either way, yes, the ability exists," is a concession of my point on ἑλκύω. There is no theological or textual reason to push against the argument that it denotes decisive movement, because the movement it concerns (ἑλκύσῃ --> δύναται) is not acting on the ability, but the granting of the ability in the first place.
No, it cannot. Your statement is not untrue, but it is also not what John 6:44 says. You have replaced the main verb of the clause with a complementary infinitive and treated the infinitive as if it carried the syntactic force of the sentence. That completely changes what the verse is saying.
The main verb of the opening clause is δύναται ("able"), not ἐλθεῖν ("to come"). ἐλθεῖν is a complementary infinitive governed by δύναται. It does not carry the assertion of the clause. It supplies the content of what the subject is or is not able to do. The main idea is the subject's ability, or lack thereof.
Your reformulation erases δύναται entirely and makes "coming" the controlling verb, which is not what John wrote. You have not derived a logical consequences of the syntax; you have replaced the syntax with a theological inference. The grammar asserts a condition for ability, not a retrospective condition for having come.
Look at the contrapositive of your reformulation:
You said "If he has come, then the Father has drawn him, and I will raise him up"
= (p --> q) ^ r
This is equivalent to (-q --> -p) ^ r, or, to reflect the ordering of clauses in John 6:44, "not p if not q, and r", which reads:
"He does not come unless the Father draws him, and I will raise him up."
What happened to ability? You've erased the main idea of the verse.
A grammatically valid paraphrase of the verse's logic must preserve John's verbal hierachy:
"No one is able to come unless the Father draws; and the enabled one will be raised."
You are essentially suggesting that the grammatical referent of αὐτὸν in the phrase ἀναστήσω αὐτὸν ("raise him up") is the one who actually comes. But that -- while theologically true -- is not a grammatical conclusion. It is not what John is saying here. Grammatically, the referent of αὐτὸν is the same αὐτὸν governed by ἑλκύσῃ. John's syntax binds the two occurrences together. The conditional structure is implicit: no one has the capacity to come unless the Father draws him, and that same him is the one who is raised. The grammar does not permit redefining the second αὐτὸν as a narrower subset of the first.
When you rewrite the verse's logic by replacing the actual main verb with a different one, recasting the conditional structure, and supplying a new semantic role to αὐτὸν that the grammar does not give it, you are not exegeting John. You are telling me what John "must have meant," but didn't say. That is the very definition of eisegesis: when the text won't give you the argument you want, rewrite it until it does.
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