By J.C. Thibodaux Related Fallacies: Oversimplification Strawman False Dilemma One of the most telling signs of the fallacious nature of Calvinist apologetics in general is its heavy reliance upon caricatures and misrepresentation of the beliefs…
Author/Scholar Index: Arminian
The Fallacies of Calvinist Apologetics – Fallacy #2: Arminianism Entails Salvation by “Inherent Ability”
Related Fallacies: Strawman “Bait and Switch” “Why are you a Christian and your friends aren’t? … Is it because you are smarter than your friend?” (The Pelagian Captivity of the Church, R.C. Sproul) …I believe…
Interesting Links – 8/16/09
Calvin Leaves a Divided Legacy in South Africa. “Now, as Protestants worldwide mark the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth, South Africans are remembering how the followers of the Protestant reformer were counted among the most…
Ephesians 1:15-16; A Devotional
Because of this, and because I heard about your faith in Lord Jesus and about your love toward all the saints, I’ve not stopped praying for you, recalling you to mind in my prayers. The…
Friday Files: Benson on Acts 13:48
Joseph Benson makes several key points in his commentaries on Acts 13:48 page 772. He argues that the Calvinist translation of tasso entails reprobation and impugns the God’s character. He argues that the Calvinist view…
Interesting Links 8-9-09
Peter Lumpkins writes about the misuse of the word “monergism” among Calvinistic Southern Baptists. Ben Henshaw asks: Do you really want to claim John Calvin as your homeboy? Check out the reply thread on this…
The Failure of God?
The following post is comprised of comments submitted to our website by [email protected], slightly revised with the author’s permission. Insofar as such infamous “failed God” arguments clearly assume the doctrine of irresistible grace (grace=force/deterministic salvation)…
Ephesians 1:13-14; A Devotional
In whom you also have heard the word of truth: the gospel of your salvation by which, having believed, you were sealed by the promised Holy Spirit who is the down payment of our allotment,…
Friday Files: Whitby on Acts 13:48
Dr. Whitby discusses Acts 13:48 in his Discorses on the 5 Points, page 70. First, he gives three problems with the Calvinist translation and then provides multiple examples of how tasso ‘ordained’ is often translated…
Roger Olson Hits A Triple Out Of The Park
I have come to appreciate Dr. Olson’s perspectives on Arminian apologetics over the past few years. The Society of Evangelical Arminians recently posted a well written commentary by Olson considering Scot McKnight’s recent blog posts…
A.W. Tozer on the Sovereignty of God
Here is a great quote by A.W. Tozer on the sovereignty of God:
“God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, “What doest thou?” Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.”
A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, chapter 22 “The Sovereignty of God”
Book can be found online here:
http://www.geocities.com/johncw7000/tozerknowledgeoftheholy.html
Hunt Critiques Piper
While reading Dave Hunt’s book, What Love is This?, I came across an interesting comment by Dave Hunt regarding a quote from Calvinist, John Piper, concerning the universal benefit of Calvary. John Piper: “We do…
Ephesians 1:11-12; A Devotional
Furthermore, in Him we have been chosen by lot (being predetermined according to the plan by which all things are worked out and according to the purpose of His will) to be who we are,…
Setting the Record Straight: The Current State of Reformation Arminianism (Part Three of Three Parts)
R. C. Sproul, in his Willing to Believe, notes:
- Repeatedly the Synod of Dort charges the Remonstrants with teaching the doctrines of Pelagianism. Is not this charge overly severe and unfair? Both Arminius and the Remonstrants sought to distance themselves from pure Pelagianism.
Arminianism is often said to be semi-Pelagian, but not, strictly speaking, Pelagian. What the fathers of Dort probably had in mind is the link between semi-Pelagianism and Pelagianism that renders the semi-Pelagian unable to escape the fundamental thesis of Pelagianism.1
But are the “fathers of Dort” right in their estimation? Is there a link between semi-Pelagianism and Arminianism? Though we agree with the Dortians that the “link between semi-Pelagianism and Pelagianism . . . renders the semi-Pelagian unable to escape the fundamental thesis of Pelagianism,” we will witness a rather glaring, broken link between semi-Pelagianism and Arminianism below.
Setting the Record Straight: The Current State of Modern Reformation Arminianism (Part Two of Three Parts)
In the (1973) preface of his book Knowing God, J. I. Packer writes, “For more than three centuries the naturalistic leaven in the Renaissance outlook has been working like a cancer in Western thought. Seventeenth-century Arminians and deists, like sixteenth-century Socinians, came to deny, as against Reformation theology, that God’s control of his world was either direct or complete, and theology, philosophy and science have for the most part combined to maintain that denial ever since.”1
In one fell swoop Packer has lumped Arminians with the heresies of the Deists and Socinians. Is Packer right in doing this? That “seventeenth-century Arminians” denied Reformation theology of God’s sovereignty is only part of the story. They did not deny God’s sovereignty, they denied the Calvinistic view of God’s sovereignty.
Setting the Record Straight: The Current State of Modern Reformation Arminianism (Part One of Three Parts)
Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987), in his The Defense of the Faith writes, “since the whole debate between the Christian and the non-Christian positions revolves about the question of the relation of the eternal to the…
Ephesians 1:7-10; A Devotional
Because this is all one sentence in the Greek, I wanted to go back and treat it the way it deserves: as one thought.
[It is in the Beloved that] we have redemption through His blood: the excusing of sins according to the abundance of His grace which He teemed into us in all wisdom and understanding having revealed to us the secret of His will, according to His good judgment, which, through Christ, was preplanned for managing the fulfillment of times in order to coalesce all things in Christ throughout the heavens and the earth.
Friday Files: On Morison’s Commentary on Romans 9
In James Morison’s commentary on Romans 9, he makes the three helpful points about God’s promise that the greater shall serve the lesser. First, it was not said of Rebecca but to her, second it…
Exegeting 1 Timothy 2:4: God Our Savior, Who Desires All People To Be Saved
To some Calvinists, the very mention of an Arminian exegesis of 1 Timothy 2:4, in an effort to defend the biblical notion that God desires the salvation of every individual on earth, is insulting, both logically and theologically.
As Alan Kurschner, from the Triablogue blog, stated, “Arminians start with the human-centered assumption that if God does not love all people undifferentiated, then he would be unjust to love some more than others. The Calvinist begins with the Biblical principle that because man is unworthy of grace and deserving only of death, God in his holiness, wisdom, and freedom chooses to love and elect any creature he desires.”
John Wesley Charges that Calvinism Makes God Out to Be Worse than the Devil
To follow up on Roger Olson’s essay recently posted here, perhaps it would be appropriate to post an excerpt from John Wesley’s famous sermon, “Free Grace”, in which he made a very similar charge about Calvinism as Olson, but more passionately and more forcefully. Whereas Olson states that Calvinism’s consistent divine determinism makes it difficult for him to tell the difference between God and the devil in the system, Wesley says that the system makes God worse than the devil and so is blasphemous (and he explains why). Now Wesley accepted Calvinists as brothers in Christ, so he surely did not mean that Calvinists are blasphemers or that they worship a false god or anything of the sort. I take him to mean that the logical implications of Calvinism are blasphemous, which Calvinists themselves might not really see, and which Wesley labored to help them see to bring them to the more bibilical position of Arminianism.
