So, instead of wasting my own time typing out what I believe and have problems with, I'll just share someone else's post that sums it up and saves me some time and new Calvinist theories, seemingly copied from the 5th century.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/03/whats-wrong-with-calvinism/
Basic to Arminianism is
God’s love. The fundamental conflict between Calvinism and Arminianism is
not sovereignty but God’s character.
If Calvinism is true, God is the author of sin, evil, innocent suffering and hell. That is to say,
if Calvinism is true God is not all-loving and perfectly good. John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
“God so loved the world.” Calvinists must explain this as meaning that God loves “all kinds of people,” not everyone. Or that “God loves all people in some ways but only some people [the elect] in all ways.” Arminians believe these interpretations distort the clear message of the Bible about God’s love. If Calvinism is true, John Wesley said,
God’s love is “such a love as makes the blood run cold.” It is indistinguishable from hate—for a large portion of humanity created in his own likeness and image.
Let me repeat.
The most basic issue is not providence or predestination or the sovereignty of God. The most basic issue is God’s character.
Calvinists commonly argue that God’s love and goodness are somehow “different” than ours. How different can they be and still be meaningful concepts?
If God’s love and goodness are compatible with predestining people to hell, then the words mean something other than they say. And if God is not perfectly good, then he is not trustworthy. If he can hate, then he can lie. Why trust Scripture to be a true revelation and guide if God is not good in some way analogous to our best ideas of goodness? If God’s goodness is consistent with predetermining large portions of people to hell, then why might it not be consistent with deceiving us? Our very trust in the Bible as God’s true revelation depends on God being good, trustworthy, one who cannot deceive.
The Calvinist, like the Arminian, approaches Scripture with the assumption that God cannot lie.
He or she can trust the Bible to be a true revelation of God if it is inspired by God. The moment the
Calvinist says “But God’s goodness is different from ours,” he or she undermines reason to trust the Bible. Of course God’s goodness is different from ours in that it is
greater, but that’s not what Calvinists faced with passages such as John 3:16 mean. They mean that God’s goodness, God’s love, is
wholly different from our highest and best concepts of them—even as revealed through Jesus Christ.
Another difference between Calvinism and Arminianism lies in Arminians’ view of
God’s sovereignty in providence. According to Arminianism,
God is now, before the coming of his Kingdom of perfect righteousness, sovereign
de jure but not
de facto. Jesus and Paul both referred to Satan as the “prince” of this world.
According to Calvinism, Satan is God’s instrument;
according to Arminianism he is a true enemy of God and presently resisting God’s will. Why God is allowing that is not revealed to us; we are only told that God is being patient. So, according to Arminianism, God limits himself, restrains his power, holds back from controlling everything. Why? For the sake of free will. God wants our freely offered and given love, not love that he has instilled in us without our consent. If Calvinism is true,
salvation is a condition, not a relationship. A
relationship requires free consent. So, in the interim, between the fall in the garden and the return of Christ in judgment, God is sovereign
by right but not
exercising that sovereignty over everything. He
could but he
doesn’t. Thus, sin, evil and innocent suffering, and especially hell, are not God’s
antecedent will but God’s
consequent will. God’s
antecedent will is what he perfectly wanted to happen—including our willing obedience out of love and everlasting fellowship with us. God’s
consequent will is what God permits to happen that is contrary to his perfect will. It is
consequent to our free choice to rebel against God and push him out of our lives and our world. It is consequent to our free choice to obey Satan and make him “god of this world” rather than obey God.
So, according to Arminianism, God is in charge but not yet in control. God is like the king of an enemy occupied territory and we Christians are like resistance fighters who look forward to the day when our hero, God, will return and take back his full sovereignty over our country. Of course, this is only an analogy. Our God is not banished from this world, but neither is he controlling everything that happens, rendering it certain according to his blueprint. If that were the case, our prayers could make no real difference. If Calvinism is true, God’s will is already being done “on earth” and yet Jesus taught us to pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Calvinism flatly contradicts that prayer.
Of course, Calvinists have their answers to all these objections, but I do not find any of them convincing. They sound forced to me.
They say, for example, that our prayers for God’s will to be done are God’s “foreordained means to a foreordained end.” In other words, our prayers are also foreordained and rendered certain by God as a means of having his will done on earth as in heaven. But, at the end of the day, that means our prayers never really change anything.
Calvinists also say that not everything is “God’s will” in the same way. For example, they say that God
wishes none had to perish in hell. That’s their interpretation of the verses cited earlier that God is not willing that any should perish but that everyone be saved. God
wishes hell were not necessary, but it is—for his full glory. God wills what he wishes he did not have to will.
Perhaps the most troubling answer of Calvinists is the two wills of God—not “antecedent” and “consequent” but “prescriptive” and “decretive.” If Calvinism is true, God decrees that people do what he forbids. God decrees things that violate his prescriptions—commands. God commands “Thou shalt not murder,” but decrees “Thou shalt murder.” Calvin explained in
Institutes, and most Calvinists agree, that God does not sin in decreeing that someone sin because God’s
intention is good whereas the murderer’s intention is evil. God intends the murder he decrees and renders certain
for his glory. The murderer, who could not do otherwise than God decrees, is guilty because his
intention is hateful. Not only is this hairsplitting; it also raises the question of the origin of the murderer’s evil intention. If every twist and turn of every thought and intention is under the direct control of God, then even the murderer’s intention cannot escape the all-determining sovereignty of Calvinism’s God. This is why Arminius stated that if Calvinism is true, not only is sin not really sin, but God is the only sinner.
Now let’s turn to Arminianism’s alternative view of God’s predestination. Here I return to the TULIP scheme. Arminians agree that fallen humans are
totally depraved in the sense Calvinism means—helpless to do anything truly good, pleasing to God, apart from grace. Arminians, however, believe in
prevenient grace—that grace of God that heals the deadly wound of sin and frees the fallen sinner from the bondage of the will to sin and gives him or her ability to exercise a good will toward God. We do not know all the means of prevenient grace, but the preaching of the gospel is one. “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” The gospel read or heard imparts prevenient grace so that the person is for the first time freed to repent and trust in God. In other words, Arminians do
not believe in “free will” but in “freed will.”
Where is prevenient grace in the Bible? Where is it
not in the Bible? It is everywhere assumed, taken for granted, presupposed by Scripture. No one seeks after God and yet many
do seek after God. That pattern of “don’t” but “do” is found everywhere in Scripture. It is explained by the concept of prevenient grace. Left to ourselves, apart from a special impartation of grace that convicts and calls, illumines and enables, we would never exercise a good will toward God. But with prevenient grace, we can and some of us do.
Arminians also believe in
unconditional election, but we believe it is
corporate election—God’s unconditional plan to have a people for himself: Israel and the church. Individual election is
conditional. It requires faith which is both a gift of God and a response of the individual. Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for God is at work in you….” (The text and subject of my sermon tomorrow morning) God provides all the ability, the seed of faith, and we freely accept it and use it to repent and trust in God alone. But once we do repent and trust, we see that it was God who made it possible in every way, so we cannot boast. And God
foreknew that we would (or wouldn’t) repent and believe. That’s another dimension of God’s election in Arminian theology. Individual election, predestination, is
conditional in that we must accept it. If we do, it turns out that God foreknew that we would (Romans 8:29: “Those whom he foreknew he did predestine….”)
One of Calvinism’s main arguments
against Arminianism is that
if Arminianism is true, God’s salvation is not
all of grace. We
earn it. Only if election to salvation is absolutely unconditional and grace irresistible, they argue, can it truly be the case that “by grace we are saved through faith.” Only then is salvation a sheer gift. This is, of course, untrue. Think of this analogy. If someone gives you a check for a thousand dollars that saves you from bankruptcy, and all you have to do is endorse the check and deposit it, did you earn part of the money? Was it any less a gift? Absolutely not. What if someone who received such a check that saved him or her from bankruptcy then boasted of having earned part of the gift? People would think him mad or ungrateful or both! A gift that must be freely received is no less a gift.
Now let’s look at Calvinism’s idea of unconditional election. If God is good and could save everyone because election to salvation is
absolutely unconditional, why doesn’t he? How can he be truly good if he
could but
doesn’t? Again, we are back at the fundamental conflict between Calvinism and Arminianism—God’s character.
Arminianism believes that the atonement of Jesus Christ is unlimited in every way. Christ died for everyone; he took the punishment for the sins of all. Does Scripture teach it? Absolutely. 1 Timothy 2:6 says that Christ gave himself as a ransom for everyone. The Greek is clear: it says “all people.” There is no room to interpret this as meaning “all kinds of people.” John Piper, noting the conflict between this verse and limited atonement, which he espouses, claims that Christ
did die for even the non-elect. His death affords them many blessings in this life even if not escape from hell in the next. Christ did not die to save them but only to offer them temporal blessings. This is the same as saying he gives the non-elect a little bit of heaven to go to hell in. Piper’s “explanation” is clearly contrary to the plain sense of this Scripture passage which is why many Calvinists cannot accept limited atonement. And yet they cannot explain why Christ would die for those God planned
not to save.
But there are other passages that completely undermine limited atonement: Romans 14:15 and 1 Corinthians 8:11. Both passages warn believers against flaunting their freedom in Christ in front of brothers and sisters of weaker conscience because this might cause one
for whom Christ died to be “destroyed.” The Greek word translated “destroyed” always only means utterly destroyed; it cannot mean “damaged.” But if Calvinism is correct, a person for whom Christ died cannot be “destroyed” because he or she is one of the elect.
