Questions about Predestination

[BenjaminRandall]

Quote:
Originally Posted by BenjaminRandall
When Calvinists are asked, "Why did God choose some but not others," they can't give a rational explanation. They resort to their most common theological copout: the glory of God and the inscrutible counsels are far above human comprehension.

KJ7 responds, [quot]e
Yes, it's a mystery. But the ability to choose God puts God in subjection to man, the creation in charge of the Creator. I'll go with mystery.[/quote]

This is an amazing statement. Apparently, God is not sovereign enough to endow humanity with the ability to choose. Apparently, if God endows humanity with free will, he becomes a slave to them.

This is why the big problem with Calvinism is that they have such a low view of the Sovereignty of God.

 

[BenjaminRandall]

Quote:
Originally Posted by BenjaminRandall
While the Arminian model might not completely satisfy these issues, it does have several advantages.

First, God in his sovereignty decreed to dignify humanity with a free will, so as to avoid a simplistic determinism. Consequently, man (Adam and Eve) freely chose to disobey God, rather than mindlessly and unavoidably fulfilling some irresistible decree.

And some Calvinists also favor the infralapsarianism position. But falling from grace does not necessarily allow a regaining of that fellowship with God of our own ability.

To which I would reply that not only does it not necessarily allow a regaining of that fellowship with God of our own ability, but because of Total Depravity, man has no ability of his own to do so at all.

Good Arminian theology holds to Total Depravity which can be overcome only by the enablement of the Spirit.

 

[BenjaminRandall]

Quote:
Originally Posted by BenjaminRandall
But, logically, the Arminian position makes God look much less like the cruel God of some Platonic determistic philosophical construct and more like the God of the Bible who was so deeply concerned for them all that he sent his Son to taste death for "every man."

No, this makes God into a kitten, to be controlled by his creation, a plaything to be taken off the shelf when we want him, and placed back on the shelf if we decide we don't want him anymore....

This is fine rhetoric, and I can imagine some Calvinist standing opposite Moses on the mountain and saying the same thing when Moses confronted the people with two options: Choose life or choose death.

When Joshua confronts the people in his old age, he told them "Choose this day whom you will serve.... As for me and my house, we will choose the Lord."

To which the articulate Calvinist, in defense of his deterministic semi-Sovereign God says, "Now Joshua, you're making God into a kitten."

 

[BenjaminRandall]

KJ7 writes,

And you are left with the conundrum of how Christ could pay for the sins of all of humanity, and how hell could still exist and be justified if those sins are handed back to us after this payment. This makes Jesus a liar, or everyone in hell is innocent since those sins were paid for, or hell must be denied in spite of what the Bible says about its existence.

This argument against Arminianism fails to take seriously the doctrine of Union with Christ. The payment has been made for sin, but only those who are united with Christ by faith are reckoned righteous.

Calvinists might feel free to argue about what "by faith" means, but the whole "innocent in hell" scenario is a weak argument against unlimited atonement.

Will anyone actually come out and say "Your sins are forgiven and you are counted justified prior to being united with Christ"? Of course not. So, the whole double payment argument is nil.

If Christ died for Joe, and if Joe doesn't believe, then he doesn't get united with Christ, and he dies without the payment actually made to his account. And so, he goes to hell with his sin debt unsettled despite atonement having been provided.

This squares well with the depiction of Jesus ministry which indicates that, to be sure, Jesus indeed came to his own proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom, but despite his proclamation to his own, his own refused him.

 

[kj7gs]

Quote:
This is an amazing statement. Apparently, God is not sovereign enough to endow humanity with the ability to choose. Apparently, if God endows humanity with free will, he becomes a slave to them.

So Arminianism's sovereignty is more sovereign than Calvinism's sovereignty, by taking away God's sovereignty and "endowing" humanity with it. Less sovereignty is more sovereignty. Now THAT is an amazing statement!

 

[kj7gs]

This is fine rhetoric, and I can imagine some Calvinist standing opposite Moses on the mountain and saying the same thing when Moses confronted the people with two options: Choose life or choose death.

When Joshua confronts the people in his old age, he told them "Choose this day whom you will serve.... As for me and my house, we will choose the Lord."

To which the articulate Calvinist, in defense of his deterministic semi-Sovereign God says, "Now Joshua, you're making God into a kitten."

Exodus is a fairly large book, so if you could elaborate as to which verse(s) you'd like me to address, I would appreciate it.

As for Joshua, chapter 24:15 is a popular verse, but it supports Calvinism more than it does Arminianism. "And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves..." -- meaning choose pagan god #1 or pagan god #2, and remain in your sins. As for me and my house (chosen), we will serve the Lord.

Handing your kitten back to you...

 

[kj7gs]

KJ7 writes,

This argument against Arminianism fails to take seriously the doctrine of Union with Christ. The payment has been made for sin, but only those who are united with Christ by faith are reckoned righteous.

I don't have any argument with your last statement because this is what Calvinists believe. Those who are united with Christ, are the elect.
I'm not familiar with the "doctrine of Union with Christ" as you put it. Where is this doctrine found?

Calvinists might feel free to argue about what "by faith" means, but the whole "innocent in hell" scenario is a weak argument against unlimited atonement.

How is it weak? You have just affirmed payment for sin for everyone, but if some are cast into hell, are those sins handed back? If so, wouldn't this make Jesus a liar? Did he pay for them or did he not?

Will anyone actually come out and say "Your sins are forgiven and you are counted justified prior to being united with Christ"? Of course not. So, the whole double payment argument is nil.

And yet you say Christ died for all, payment in full. If. Which makes it not a payment after all. At most it's a roulette wheel, a down payment that depends on a final payment with a decision for Christ. Not so, Christ bought and paid for those whom the Father had given him. Free delivery via the Holy Spirit.

If Christ died for Joe, and if Joe doesn't believe, then he doesn't get united with Christ, and he dies without the payment actually made to his account. And so, he goes to hell with his sin debt unsettled despite atonement having been provided.

If Joe doesn't believe, this can only mean that the Father did not give Joe to the Son. Atonement was never provided, if it was then Joe would have been effectually called and his eyes opened.

This squares well with the depiction of Jesus ministry which indicates that, to be sure, Jesus indeed came to his own proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom, but despite his proclamation to his own, his own refused him.

"His own" would have to refer to the Jews, who had long ago forgotten the heart and lived by law alone for their salvation. These were not his sheep, and they did not know his voice.

 

[BenjaminRandall]

Regarding hell, we really know so little about its torments or what the individual's response to it might be. I think it is overly speculative to deny to the person in hell a sense of guilt and regret and personal horror over one's own sinfulness, or a recognition of the justice of the punishment.

The story of Lazarus and the rich man might be instructive here. He is conscious of his torment. He is concerned for his brothers. He is eager for them to believe Moses. He does not deny his worthiness of the torments of hell. It concludes with the assumption of the reasonableness of Abraham's discourse with him.

While the story does not say very much about the perspective of the person in hell, it does seem to lead toward thinking that such a person would affirm the righteousness of God and personal regret for sin.

 

[BenjaminRandall]

Regarding the character of God and hell, I think that some items are not negotiable.

First, whatever else, God is just, fair, and absolutely holy.

While the doctrine of hell is horrible--really, unthinkable, it arises out this idea of the absolute holiness of God. Because God is infinite, eternal, and infinitely holy, any sin against an infinite, eternal God deserves an infinite and eternal punishment.

Consequentl, I think that, whatever else might be said about these issues, hell is a logical necessity for anyone who sins against God.

It sounds as if Pippa and many others might accept these basic premises. If so, then the real question is whether God, who is otherwise described as gracious and loving, could have created a race which he foreknew would fall and end up being justly sent to hell.

I think others also may have framed the issue well enough already.

As I've already intimated, a Calvinist deterministic soteriology compounds the issue. Supralapsarianism is more consistent with the system, but makes God's character all the more difficult to understand in terms of the biblical portrait of him.

But even infralapsarianism still envisions God knowingly creating a race that would become guilty of hell without providing the means whereby many of them, indeed, the vast majority of them, might receive forgiveness.

At least, in the Arminian system, God offers a means of forgiveness to every man, for Christ tasted death for every man.

 

[BenjaminRandall]

Quote:
Originally Posted by BenjaminRandall
This is fine rhetoric, and I can imagine some Calvinist standing opposite Moses on the mountain and saying the same thing when Moses confronted the people with two options: Choose life or choose death.

Exodus is a fairly large book, so if you could elaborate as to which verse(s) you'd like me to address, I would appreciate it.

Sorry. Actually, I had in mind the concluding chapters of Deuteronomy which form a single narrative unit in which the Israelites are confronted with an offer of life or an offer of death, of blessing or of cursing.

Of course any natural reading of the ending of Deuteronomy (or the ending of Joshua) would assume that the individual Israelites had the ability to make choices about whether they would live or the Lord or not live for him, which is an entirely consonant with an Arminian perspective.

It's pretty incredible to conclude that such an Arminian perspective makes God into a cuddly kitten, given the curses listed in Deut 29 for failure to choose life.

Given such a portrait of God, if he is a kitten, I'd hate to see the lion! The cute kitten language may be effective rhetorically, but it doesn't give an accurate portait.

 

[pippa]

if hell is necessary, then God shouldnt have created us in the first place. simple as that. if he is nice.

 

[mlqurgw]

if hell is necessary, then God shouldnt have created us in the first place. simple as that. if he is nice.

Whose standard of nice are you judging God by? Would mercy be known if evil didn't exist? Would kindness, patience, longsuffering and forgiveness mean anything if we didn't need it? Does God have to submit to your standard? These are some of the questions I have been working on and as soon as I can get all my thoughts together on them I will PM you.

 

[mlqurgw]

KJ7 writes,

This argument against Arminianism fails to take seriously the doctrine of Union with Christ. The payment has been made for sin, but only those who are united with Christ by faith are reckoned righteous.

Calvinists might feel free to argue about what "by faith" means, but the whole "innocent in hell" scenario is a weak argument against unlimited atonement.

Will anyone actually come out and say "Your sins are forgiven and you are counted justified prior to being united with Christ"? Of course not. So, the whole double payment argument is nil.

If Christ died for Joe, and if Joe doesn't believe, then he doesn't get united with Christ, and he dies without the payment actually made to his account. And so, he goes to hell with his sin debt unsettled despite atonement having been provided.

This squares well with the depiction of Jesus ministry which indicates that, to be sure, Jesus indeed came to his own proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom, but despite his proclamation to his own, his own refused him.

So then Christ paid more debt than was due? That isn't justice. He either put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself or He didn't. If He did all those whose sins He bore in His own body on the tree have no sin to be judged. If He didn't then none of us have hope. You make Christ to have bought something He may never take possession of. If atonement has been made the debt is settled. If it isn't settled atonement means nothing, the sacrifice was pointless and the blood has no real value. If God is satisfied by the death of Christ for sin, which He is because Christ is raised from the dead, then how can He again punish any for whom Christ shed His blood? It ain't possible. No wonder we have such a warped system of justice in this country. It comes from Arminian theology.

 

[pippa]

Whose standard of nice are you judging God by? Would mercy be known if evil didn't exist? Would kindness, patience, longsuffering and forgiveness mean anything if we didn't need it? Does God have to submit to your standard? These are some of the questions I have been working on and as soon as I can get all my thoughts together on them I will PM you.

i'm judging 'nice' by human standaards. isnt that ok? i got my standards from the bible.
ok thanks.

 

[bradfordl]

i'm judging 'nice' by human standaards. isnt that ok? i got my standards from the bible.
ok thanks.

Go ahead, pips, keep kicking against the goads. God will do one of two things; eventually change the bitterness in your heart towards Him into gratitude and rejoicing; or leave you to your own devices to descend into darkness and finally have a firsthand knowledge of that hell you abhor. All your protestations and complaints will in the end be irrelavent. You will submit to the will of God whether you want to or not.

 

[pippa]

Go ahead, pips, keep kicking against the goads. God will do one of two things; eventually change the bitterness in your heart towards Him into gratitude and rejoicing; or leave you to your own devices to descend into darkness and finally have a firsthand knowledge of that hell you abhor. All your protestations and complaints will in the end be irrelavent. You will submit to the will of God whether you want to or not.

it's not that i'm rebelling against God. its that i'm wondering if i've been mistaken in believing in him, and believing in the bible. because it doesnt seem to add up. if i'm going to burn in hell for noticing things which dont seem to add up, he must certainly be extremely cruel.

 

[bradfordl]

it's not that i'm rebelling against God. its that i'm wondering if i've been mistaken in believing in him, and believing in the bible. because it doesnt seem to add up. if i'm going to burn in hell for noticing things which dont seem to add up, he must certainly be extremely cruel.

Pippa, you need to understand, many of us have been through the doubts and trepidations that you are experiencing now. There really is no silver bullet solution to your dilemma. Either God will show you your error and grant you relief from your strivings, or He will not. The reality is that these problems arise from unbelief and bitterness. I know this because I have wrestled with these enemies myself in the past, as some here might be so long in the tooth as to recall. But God had mercy upon me beyond measure, and for that I am grateful to Him as much as I am able while yet in the body.

Your measure of what is right or fair or kind or cruel you must first be convinced is tainted by the fact that you are a mere human. A speck of dust shaking its fist at its very Creator for having creating you as you are. You can study this difficulty with all the powers of logic you can muster, and the final analysis will necessarily be that a Being capable of creating such an immense and complex universe, and able to uphold its existence, must be all-wise and all-holy, before whom all your protestations will fall to the ground.

The truth is that you are presuming to set yourself up as qualified to judge the motives of God from criteria that spring from your own fallen, sinful and comparatively insignificant mind. That is a futile fool's errand.

 

[BenjaminRandall]

Back on the question of whether hell is a double payment....

By the way, are we clear now about the doctrine of Union with Christ? All the "in Christ" passages? Rom 6; John 15; Eph 1; etc.? (For a pretty good treatment of the doctrine, read the pertinent sections of Calvinist W.G.T. Shedd whose 3 vol Dogmatic Theology is one of the classic Calvinistic systematics. Or for a quick devotional though theologically sensitive work, read the little book by Lewis Smedes, Union with Christ.)





Anyway, regarding the charge that hell would be double payment if Christ indeed (according to Scriptures) tasted death for every man...

We might disagree over whether or not union with Christ is automatic or conditioned on faith, but Arminianism is not logically inconsistent with itself on the double payment issue. Let me explain....

Whether you're Calvinist or Arminian, you must accept a two-fold aspect to Christ's payment. First, Christ died for a particular person's sin, and second, God unites that person to Christ so that the person can be said to be "in Christ." Both Calvinists and Arminians are agreed on this issue. You must have both aspects!

Where the dividing point is, is whether Union with Christ is automatic. I admit that this is the real issue of the debate.

But, if we assume momentarily that Union with Christ is not automatic, but is conditioned on faith, then it is entirely logical to say that Christ bore a person's sin debt on the cross, but that the unbeliever remains unforgiven on the basis that he was never united with Christ.

Again, I admit that we all may disagree on whether union with Christ is conditional, but, if it is, then there is no logical reason to conclude that universal atonement entails a double penalty. Arminianism is logically consistent with itself on this issue.

Therefore, Calvinists should focus their debate effort on whether union with Christ is conditioned upon faith. But the charge of double payment ends up as red herring fluff. The real issue is whether union with Christ is by faith.


*************
(For further scholarly analysis of this issue, if anyone is interested, I would point to an article written by 4-point Calvinist Lewis Sperry Chafer, and reprinted back in the 1980s in Theology Today.)

 

[heymikey80]

how is hell kind then?
was sadam hussein kind?
pippa

First, this is an ad hominem attack. Of God. Saddam Hussein was not kind, but he wasn't kind because the thoughts and intents of his heart were evil.

Are you thinking God intends evil -- not simply the punishments of evil, but actually evil -- on those who defy Him?

Second, Hell is kind because it is more consistent with God's actual care for people than His leaving them to their own evil. The constant downward spiral of evil does indeed result in something more cruel than Hell.

It results in unresolved evil.

The interesting thing about your argument so far has been to focus on evil people as if they're not deserving of such punishment. Prove that case. Tell me that Hussein doesn't deserve to rot in Hell for all eternity. Tell me that Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot are so pitiful that they don't deserve the resolution, the consequence of their sins.

And then show me that the origins of their sins are not the same as mine. So the results of my sins are not the same as theirs.

Otherwise I'm actually most pleased to take the intense, severe, and eternal punishment as not only good, but kind toward the depths of such evil.

if God has to punish people with such a horrible thing as hell, it was cruel of him to create the world in the first place.

this defines cruelty without its connotations. You can't promote the denotation of "intense, severe, painful" consequences into "therefore wrong".

That's all your case is. It is in fact based solely on human sentiment, promoted into eternal justice.

And that's wrong. Justice is not how I feel. Justice is what is right.

"Cruelty" has a connotation -- that intense, severe, painful infliction has to be for its own sadistic reasons, or for some evil purpose. Otherwise it's not cruelty. It's punishment.

If you think punishment is wrong, then I just have to deny the assertion. Kids who grow up either without punishment, or without recognizing it as such land in the harshness of prison, and probably will be there indefinitely. Which is rather similar to the pattern on display in God's punishment.

 

[bradfordl]

Tell me that Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot are so pitiful that they don't deserve the resolution, the consequence of their sins.

And then show me that the origins of their sins are not the same as mine.

And here is probably the source of your confusion, Pippa. You are not convinced of the horrendous character of most people's sin, and especially your own. I can't remember who I heard this from, maybe Sproul, but the example was that we tend to want to see ourselves as closer to Christ on a scale between His righteousness and Hitler's immense evil. Wrong! It is more accurate to say we are in a bear-hug with Hitler on that scale. We are abhorrant abominations before God without the covering of the blood of His Son.

Of course you may say, "Why does He still find fault? For who can resist His will?" or, "Why have You made me like this?", and Paul has an answer for you. That you are no-one to reply against your maker. That the pot has no place interrogating the Potter as though at all qualified or capable of judging the wisdom or righteousness of His design.

You are a consciousness walking around in a body that is itself far too complicated for you to understand its workings. Just the eyeball through which you are seeing this text is a creation of such magnificent complexity that man has through millenia of study still only a rudimentary understanding of its operation. You exist in a universe that only demonstrates exponentially greater and more awesome creative complexity inch by inch as you move your gaze outward from the end of your nose.

Where do you find the arrogance to indict the motives or wisdom of the Being Who has wrought such things as these?

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.