Thibodaux. Josh

J.C. Thibodaux, “The Calvinist Mitigation of the Divine Warnings Given to the Saints”

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  Central to the debate over inevitable perseverance are the the numerous warnings in scripture cautioning the saints against falling away. A prominent explanation offered as to why the scriptures would say such things, if falling away is not truly possible for a believer, is that God uses such warnings as a means to spur Christians on to perseverance. Despite these efforts, the scriptural warnings addressed to genuine believers, some of which pronounce eternal destruction for violating certain commandments of God, constitute an airtight argument against the Calvinist teaching of inevitable perseverance of the saints, in that teaching that what the scriptures warn against could not truly occur strips the divine warnings of all relevance, making them of no effect.

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J.C. Thibodaux, “Response to Desiring God on Original Sin”

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The following is an analysis and response to the article, What is the biblical evidence for the imputation of Adam’s Sin?, by Desiring God Ministries, retrieved from,

http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Articles/ByDate/2006/1451_What_is_the_biblical_evidence_for_the_imputation_of_Adams_Sin/

I’ve recently been debating the issue of original sin. I do hold very firmly that it is by Adam’s sin that sin entered into the world and has tainted the nature of his descendants, but am much against the idea that all men are guilty of Adam’s sin. I recently debated the subject on Reformed Mafia, and now take on an article written by the staff of John Piper’s ‘Desiring God’ ministries. We go over their primary pieces of evidence with rebuttal. Piper opens his case for the Calvinist view of original sin with:

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J.C. Thibodaux, “If Our Actions Are Inevitable, Do We Really Have Free Will?”

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Calvinists reject the idea that God bases His divine election on His foreknowledge of people, as well as the idea that God has given men free will. One tactic used to refute these concepts is to try to confuse the issue:

“For example, before the foundation of the world, God knew that Joe would make a free decision to become a Christian. Somehow, then, before Joe was born, God knew of his free decision. So even at that time, Joe’s free decision must have been inevitable. Why was it inevitable? Not because of Joe’s free will, for Joe was not yet born. Not because of God’s predestination, because the Arminian denies that possibility from the outset. It would seem that the inevitability in question had some source other than either Joe or God.”

Excerpt From Apologetics to the Glory of God by John Frame pp. 44-45 (P & R Publishing)

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Why I Reject Determinism and A Model of God’s Atemporal Perspective in Relation to Contrary Choice

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One of the questions we invariably get from Determinists is “But HOW does God know the future??” Determinists often seize upon the difficulty of understanding God’s knowledge, and insist that if God didn’t cause the future, then He could not have known it. Besides being a rather silly stretch, this claim requires several unfounded assumptions about the nature of God.

The Basic Views

Now before I jump in any deeper, let’s define what the major views of God’s knowledge in relation to free will are (this is just a basic list, variations of these views exist):

1. Determinism: God determines absolutely all that will be, making absolute foreknowledge trivial. There is no such things as libertarian free will, and our choices cannot be otherwise.

Affirms foreknowledge, but has the very unfortunate side-effect of making absolutely everything that occurs the will of God, and possibly essential to His nature, as we’ll touch on below.

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Prevenient Grace and Libertarian Free Will

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The content of this post was authored by J.C. Thibodaux and is posted on his behalf.

Many Calvinists point to such concepts as total depravity and bondage of the will to make the case that the will is not free, but don’t realize that they hit cleanly beside the point in that we agree that the human will is by nature enslaved to sin.

One cannot correctly understand the Arminian/Synergist view of libertarian free will without first understanding prevenient grace. Reformed theologians are correct in saying that the human will is in bondage to sin stemming from the sin of Adam,

Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. (Romans 8:7)

Thus by nature, human beings are blind and hard-hearted towards the gospel and cannot believe in Christ of their own accord. To overcome the power of the sinful nature, something stronger than sin must enter into the equation, which can only come from God. Jesus said in John 6:44,

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Challies: Defending Arminians Unfair to Their Accusers

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The content of this post was authored by J.C. Thibodaux and is posted on his behalf.

Recently, Tim Challies did a review of Roger E. Olson’s Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities,

He cites a paragraph from the book:

“When conservative theologians declare that synergism is a heresy, they are usually referring to these two Pelagian forms of synergism. Classical Arminians agree. This is a major theme of this book. Contrary to confused critics, classical Arminianism is neither Pelagian nor semi-Pelagian! But it is synergistic. Arminianism is evangelical synergism as opposed to heretical, humanistic synergism.”

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