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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: My salvation implies your damnation?
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Gamaliel
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# 812
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Posted
No, of course God isn't like Molech or some kind of ju-ju priest and that's why, like you, I reject the more mechanistic extremes of certain forms of Calvinism - the hyper-Calvinist end of the spectrum.
What I'm saying is that speculation about how freewill/predestination works out in practice is akin to the angels dancing on a pin thing because none of us - whatever our tradition or theological position - is going to be able to figure that one out.
The whole thing is a mystery and a conundrum. I'm happy to leave it that way.
That doesn't mean I'm disengaging my brain.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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daronmedway
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# 3012
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
We only need to find ONE instance of people resisting God's grace to discover that God's grace is resistible. So my inductive approach is perfectly valid.
Not so. All you can prove by this form of inferential reasoning is that there are occasions when God allows people to resist his grace, that grace is resistible until such time as it is not. What you cannot prove is that the texts which speak of sovereign irresistible grace aren't true or do not mean what they say. They simply show that at some point grace becomes irresistible. My way of reading scripture allows me the submit to both aspects of reality, yours doesn't.
[ 19. November 2013, 17:48: Message edited by: daronmedway ]
Posts: 6976 | From: Southampton | Registered: Jul 2002
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daronmedway
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# 3012
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Posted
Irresistible grace doesn't mean that every influence of the Holy Spirit can't be resisted. It means that the Holy Spirit, whenever he chooses, can overcome that resistance and make his influence irresistible.
Posts: 6976 | From: Southampton | Registered: Jul 2002
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by daronmedway
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical
We only need to find ONE instance of people resisting God's grace to discover that God's grace is resistible. So my inductive approach is perfectly valid.
Not so. All you can prove by this form of inferential reasoning is that there are occasions when God allows people to resist his grace, that grace is resistible until such time as it is not. What you cannot prove is that the texts which speak of sovereign irresistible grace aren't true or do not mean what they say. They simply show that at some point grace becomes irresistible. My way of reading scripture allows me the submit to both aspects of reality, yours doesn't.
Actually my reasoning is sound, because the presupposition behind it is valid, namely, the consistency of God's nature. Your view of God makes a mockery of his grief at those who rebel against him, because he could have made his grace irresistible to them. For example, if you are right, then Jesus' weeping over Jerusalem was completely pointless, considering that he knew that he could save all those people by extending irresistible rather than resistible grace to them. This makes his tears look totally insincere. Likewise, God could have saved all those who perished in the flood, instead of misleading us with words such as "my Spirit shall not strive with man forever", which implies the operation of free will to resist the convicting work of the Spirit.
But anyway, I guess I could live with the idea that God predestines some to salvation and offers resistible grace to everyone else. It still makes God a blatant respecter of persons, but it's tolerable, because at least every person has an opportunity to be saved. What is completely ruled out by the entire testimony of Scripture is the idea that God refuses to extend any grace at all to some people, knowing that there is absolutely no way any of them - from conception onwards - could escape eventual eternal torture in hell.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Well yes, and that is the natural corollary of a certain brand of hyper-Calvinism.
Daronmedway won't like me saying this, and it's not meant as a dig or a personal criticism of him nor of Reformed folk in general, but the issue I have with Calvinism - on the populist level - is that it tends to bend the scriptures to fit in with its particular schema rather than the other way round.
For every proof-text they can cite about sovereign and irresistible grace (as popularly understood, and I agree the position is more nuanced than might first appear) there's an equally weighty one which could be used to suggest otherwise.
The over-arching paradigm, of course, as EE has correctly identified, is love. I certainly can't see how a loving deity could create people who were eternally destined for hell-fire irrespective of any other factor that might be brought to bear.
If one believes that then the only way to resolve or square it with what we know of the character of God as revealed in scripture is to engage in sophistry - ie:
'Ah well, you're using human conceptions of justice ... 'Who are you, oh man, to talk back to God?' ... etc etc ... we all know how it goes.
Sure, Calvin sometimes rings true and the motivation between Calvinism is a sound one, I believe ... but as with a lot of Western Scholastic and late medieval neo-Platonic stuff (and that's what it is, effectively), it goes too far.
In seeking to elide the late medieval RC system of works and penances and masses for the dead and so on - the 'industrialisation of penance' as Rowan Williams once tellingly described it - they emphasised grace working through faith - or 'faith working through love' - but in so doing entered into all manner of knotty speculations about the actual mechanics of it all.
And here's where the problem lies, it seems to me. Taken to the extreme it constructs a Mecanno-style edifice that finds scriptural support in some places or not in others. On those places where scriptural support becomes thin they shore it all up with sophistry and speculations of their own.
They don't like it when people point that out to them, but it's effectively what they do. Whilst all the time claiming to have scripture on their side.
Arminians do the same thing in reverse.
Both systems are incomplete and provisional.
That's why I don't think speculation about these things - interesting though it might be - actually gets us very far down the road. You can find grace in all systems and across all traditions. The wind bloweth where it listeth.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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