Sir Hydration Transfer Engineer @Bashj7

Calvinism creates a “secret will” of God because without it, the system cannot explain the contradictions between what God supposedly reveals and what Calvinism says God actually decrees. But that creates a serious problem in that why should I trust a God who tells me one thing while secretly willing something contradictory? Jesus, who perfectly reveals the Father, said: “If it were not so, I would have told you.” (John 14:2) Jesus shows there is no secret, contradictory will of the Father exists. Jesus did not teach us to believe that the Father says one thing while secretly intending another. He revealed the Father as He truly is. The Calvinist appeal to a “secret will” can become a theological escape hatch so that whenever Scripture says God desires something that Calvinism says He does not actually will, the contradiction is simply moved into the category of God’s “secret will.” But that isn't an explanation. It is a way of protecting the system from Scripture. About secrets, God's word says: Amos 3:7 “Surely the Lord GOD does nothing Unless He reveals His secret counsel To His servants the prophets.” God certainly has purposes He has not revealed to us. But that is very different from claiming that God's secret will contradicts what He has revealed about His desires, character, and intentions. I don't need a secret, contradictory will to explain away the plain words of Jesus. I trust Jesus. If Jesus says something is so, I believe Him. If Scripture says God desires something, I don't need to invent a hidden will that says the opposite just to make Calvinism work. Dinesh @DineshDSouza here is some biblical help with the secret will of God.

4. Christology as the Center Ultimately, my theology is grounded in the Incarnation. Philippians 2 tells us that God entered human flesh. In Christ, God entered real, sequential, historical time and genuinely interacted with His creation. Jesus genuinely grieved at Lazarus's tomb. He marveled at the faith of the centurion. He marveled at the unbelief in Nazareth. He pleaded in the Garden of Gethsemane. And He wept over Jerusalem: > “How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” I know the Calvinist answer is that God's revealed will and His decretive will can be distinguished. I'm not pretending there isn't an answer. But I still think there is a very serious question here: If God had eternally decreed that these people would reject Christ and had determined that they would never be given the grace necessary to respond differently, in what meaningful sense were they unwilling to do what Jesus genuinely wanted them to do? That's not a rhetorical question I expect to settle the entire Calvinist system. But I think it deserves a serious answer. I don't throw Calvinists out of the Kingdom, and I don't throw Open Theists out either. Both are human theological frameworks attempting to comprehend the mystery of an infinite God relating to a finite creation. But I cannot accept a model of sovereignty that requires God to causally determine every human choice, including every evil act and every rejection of Christ, while simultaneously holding those creatures morally responsible for choices they could never have done otherwise. At the same time, I'm not claiming that God is surprised by history or that He is sitting in heaven hoping things work out. I believe God knows what He is doing. I believe He knows the end from the beginning. I believe He knows every possible contingency and every possible human response. I believe He can intervene whenever He chooses. I believe He can accomplish His purposes without controlling every human decision. And I believe He has provided genuine grace and a genuine invitation to humanity. So I don't think the real question is whether God knows, draws, gives, predestines, or sovereignly accomplishes His purposes. I affirm all of those things. The question is whether God's sovereignty requires Him to causally determine every human choice, including every sinful choice and every person's rejection of Christ. I don't see Scripture requiring that conclusion. I trust the character of God as revealed in the face of Jesus Christ: a God of genuine love, real invitation, and sovereign relational grace or to sum it up with my new term, "Relational Theism."

So in that very basic sense, I would argue that every Christian tradition, including theistic determinism, has to begin with God being “open” to creation. There was a genuine point at which creation had not happened, and God was free to create or not create. The interesting question is what happened after God freely chose to create. The theistic determinist says that once God chose to create, He sovereignly fixed and determined every event and every human choice from eternity past. Every atomic movement, every thought, every decision, every sin, and every outcome ultimately falls within His exhaustive decree. I am asking a more basic question: If God was genuinely free to create or not create, why must His sovereignty over the creation He chose to make require Him to causally determine every decision made by the creatures within it? My relational theism proposes that God sovereignly chose to create a world containing genuine creaturely freedom—creatures capable of authentic love, real rebellion, and genuine interaction with their Creator. I don't believe that gives up God's sovereignty. Quite the opposite. God doesn't need to causally dictate every variable in order to guarantee His ultimate victory. A master chess grandmaster doesn't have to move his opponent's pieces in order to guarantee that he will win. His ability to respond to his opponent's moves while still accomplishing his ultimate purpose is part of what demonstrates his mastery. Obviously, God is infinitely greater than that analogy. My point is simply that God's sovereignty can be demonstrated by His ability to accomplish His purposes through genuine history and genuine creaturely choices, rather than by making every choice Himself. 3. John 6: Context and the “Drawing” of God You argued that John 6 shows God unilaterally withholding enabling grace from certain individuals simply because He chose not to enable them. I think we need to look closely at how Jesus Himself explains the “drawing” in that very chapter. Verse 44 says: > “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them.” But immediately afterward, in verse 45, Jesus explains: > “They will all be taught by God. Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” So coming to Jesus is explicitly connected to hearing and learning from the Father. That takes us right back to the preceding discussion in John 5. Jesus had already told these people that they searched the Scriptures because they thought they had eternal life in them, but they refused to come to Him. He then says that they don't believe Moses, because if they really believed Moses, they would believe Him. So when Jesus says in John 6 that those who have heard and learned from the Father come to Him, I don't think we should ignore the immediate context of John 5. These people had God's revelation through Moses and the Prophets, but they had rejected the very revelation that pointed them toward Christ. That's why I don't think the passage requires us to conclude that God had eternally decided, before these people were born, that they would never receive saving grace. There is a massive theological difference between God judicially hardening people in response to their persistent rejection of His revelation and God determining from eternity past that they could never be saved because He chose not to give them the grace necessary for them to believe. Those are two very different claims, and I don't think John 6 by itself establishes the second one. You point to verses 36–37 and say that those who didn't believe were not among those the Father gave to Jesus. But I think that assumes the very thing we're debating. The question is whether “giving,” “drawing,” and “enabling” necessarily mean an irresistible, individually selective grace that God withholds from people who otherwise could never respond. I don't think the text has established that. (One more)

@kingagrifta @edfortyhands @DineshDSouza Quick question do you believe the unborn, newborns, and the mentally disabled are guilty of the sin of Adam and deserve eternal damnation?

If anybody ever wonders why so much of my "X" feed is all about Calvinism it's because it's false. Not only is it false ,it destroyed my church and hurt family members. It is a stain on Christianity and the good news of the Gospel. And for this man @IrrTruth to claim he's a follower of Jesus Christ and say these horrific statements to an atheist......Lord have mercy.

Cheryl Schatz 🩸 @CherylSchatz

4 days ago

According to Derek from Irresistible Truth, this atheist understands Calvinism's doctrine of salvation. Derek seems stunned! @DineshDSouza @HomeAndHandy

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Imagine having some horrendous evil happen to your family or your children and then having this irrepressibly cheerful guy tell you, “Guess what? God did it! It’s all part of His plan for you.”

AnAverageOhioan @AnAverageO3w8

7 days ago

This is one of the main reasons I cannot stand Calvinism, and why I cannot play nice with them. Stuff like this is actively taught in the Church, and then called good. And people hear this, listen to it, and this is supposed to give them comfort.

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@JSargentRR @thejoezaza This weak man blocks people who expose his gnosticism.

6.. The Augustinian Paradigm vs. the Early Church You say that if Augustine had never lived, these passages would still be there. That's true, but his philosophical framework wouldn't be, it'more than likely theistic determinism and eventually Calvinism would never have occurred. Augustaine is the poison that has "poisoned" the well of Christianity for the last 1500 years. That's why I think the historical question still matters. We need to ask whether the Augustinian interpretation was actually the inevitable meaning of these passages from the beginning. It has been pretty well established by historians and theologians that not a single church father or early Christian writer talked in terms that would be consistent with Calvinism. It only occurred after Augustine and only for a short period of time until the reformers. John Chrysostom (349–407), for example, specifically addressed the Manichaean use of John 6:44. Commenting on the passage, he wrote: "The Manichæans spring upon these words, saying, ‘that nothing lies in our own power’; yet the expression shows that we are masters of our will. ‘For if a man comes to Him,’ saith some one, ‘what need is there of drawing?’ But the words do not take away our free will, but show that we greatly need assistance. And He implies not an unwilling comer, but one enjoying much succor." That's significant to me because Chrysostom didn't read divine drawing as an irresistible override of an inert soul. He understood it as divine assistance that was genuinely needed. So when we look at these passages, I don't think we can simply assume that Augustine's later framework gives us the correct lens through which every earlier passage must be interpreted. Scripture reveals a God whose sovereign plan has always been to save "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord" (Rom 10:13)—not because of human merit, but because He genuinely loves the world He made. Most Calvinists are un willing to do this but I believe you have to deal with what your system actually entails. Your framework teaches that simply by being conceived, an image-bearer is legally guilty, totally unable to respond to the gospel, and fit for destruction. I believe that is where your definition of "dead in sin" has caused so many problems including baptism of infants even the immaculate conception of Mary. So do you believe an unborn child, infant, or a profoundly mentally disabled person who never possesses the capacity to understand or consciously reject the gospel is personally guilty before God and deserves eternal punishment simply because Adam sinned? If your answer is no, then what accounts for the difference? Because if "dead in sin" means that every human being is born under the same judicial guilt, the same total inability, and the same deserving of eternal punishment, then I think you have a serious problem that cannot simply be solved by saying, "God is sovereign." And that brings us back to where we started. Your system may be internally consistent. But that still doesn't establish that its premises are biblical. That is the question I keep coming back to. Not whether Calvinism can explain the Scriptures. Can you demonstrate from Scripture that Calvinism is what the Scriptures actually teach?

3. Spiritual Death and the "Epistemological Loop" You ask how an unbeliever escapes the self-protecting suppression loop of Romans 1 if they are "dead in sins" (Eph 2:1). I think the problem with your "epistemological loop" is that you've already assumed the very thing you're trying to prove. You define spiritual death as an inability to respond to God, and then reason that the sinner therefore cannot respond to God. But Scripture never says that "dead in trespasses and sins" means a person has no capacity whatsoever to hear, understand, repent, or respond to God's gracious call. The error here is importing a philosophical definition of death, complete metaphysical inertness, into a biblical concept. In Scripture, death can describe relational separation, NOT total inability to hear or respond. When the prodigal son returned, the father said, "This my son was dead, and is alive again" (Luke 15:24). The prodigal wasn't unconscious. He remembered his father's house, came to himself, recognized his condition, and returned. How does the sinner hear? Because God's Word is not passive. "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword" (Heb 4:12), and the gospel itself is "the power of God for salvation" (Rom 1:16). The Holy Spirit convicts the world through the proclaimed Word (John 16:8). The light breaks through the suppression; it does not require an unconditional, secret regeneration before a person can trust Christ. 4. "What Accounts for the Difference?" Actually, I think there is some projection going on in your question. If everybody is on level ground at the cross, nobody is inherently special, and nobody is preselected because they are better than anyone else, then the person who believes isn't the "special one." But under your system, if you believe because you were preselected for salvation while the other person was not, you actually are the special one in the only sense that ultimately matters. Calvinism reminds me of the kid in PE class who gets picked first for the team because he's the best dodgeball player. I don't think you realize how easy it is for that way of thinking to become a source of spiritual pride. You may say, "I had nothing to do with my election," but at the end of the day you're still saying, "I am one of the elect, and that other person isn't." Also, you seem to assume that if God doesn't causally determine the choice, then there must be some positive quality in the believer that caused him to believe. I don't accept that premise. A free response doesn't have to be explained by a superior intellect, superior morality, or superior nature. The sinner can simply be responsible for his response. Boasters look to what they accomplished; the believer looks entirely to the Savior. Blame lies completely with the one who resists (Matt 23:37, Acts 7:51). 5. Election: Service vs. Individual Reprobation When Deuteronomy 7 speaks of choosing Israel, it is an election to service and purpose, not a guarantee of individual eternal salvation. God chose Israel to be the vehicle that gave us God's word and bring forth the Messiah to bless all nations (Gen 12:3). Most of that chosen nation perished in the wilderness due to unbelief (1 Cor 10:5). I don't deny election. I deny that the biblical concept of election automatically means that God unconditionally selected individual people for eternal salvation and unconditionally passed over everyone else. Deuteronomy 7 clearly demonstrates corporate election for a particular covenant purpose. So the question isn't whether God elects. The question is what kind of election the New Testament passages are talking about. Conflating God's historical, corporate election of a people for a redemptive task with an unconditional decree that consigns individual souls to heaven or hell before birth is, in my view, the foundational error of the entire system.

@pipergrace76 Another fragile calvinist just blocked me. It's typical and inevitable when their philosophy is exposed. Jenna keep doing what you're doing. I don't know if the fragile @pipergrace76will see this but he refused to address my theological biblical criticism of his philosophy. This was what I was going to respond to his proof texting. Classic move: drop four isolated proof-texts, declare it your "final response," and run before anyone can check the context. ​None of those verses mean what your system forces them to mean: ​Romans 3 proves universal sinfulness—that both Jews and Gentiles are under sin and need a Savior—not that man is ontologically incapable of responding to God's conviction. ​John 6:44 says no one can come unless drawn, but you ignore Jesus in John 12:32 saying, "I will draw all people to myself." The drawing is real and widespread, not an exclusive pass for a pre-selected club. ​Romans 9 is about God's sovereign right to save through faith rather than Jewish ancestry, not an eternal decree predetermining individual children to hell. ​1 Corinthians 4:7 is about spiritual gifts in Corinth. Paul is rebuking people for boasting about gifts like prophecy and tongues—he isn't defining salvific faith as an irresistible program injected into a select few. ​You haven’t established your case; you’ve just pasted Augustinian glasses over Jewish texts. And spare me the performance of humble reverence. At the end of the day, your system demands that God looks at billions of equally guilty souls, arbitrarily says "I'll love this one and discard the rest," and you happen to be one of the lucky VIPs. Wrapping arbitrary cosmic favoritism in pious language doesn't make it holy—it just makes it tragic.

Your entire response is pure question-begging. You are assuming the truth of your Augustinian framework to defend the framework itself, demanding that I argue as if your system is the standard when your system is the exact thing under debate. ​Equating foreknowledge with divine decree is just as flawed. Knowing a child will reject your love is worlds apart from actively designing them incapable of receiving it, refusing to provide a cure, and then burning them for a condition you intentionally mandated. ​In my view, God genuinely loves all people, Christ actually shed His blood for every soul, and the lost perish because they resisted the living God who called them. In your view, God orchestrated their ruin before Genesis 1, provided no atonement, and damns them for doing exactly what His decree required. Don't pretend those are the same dilemma. ​And stop twisting Scripture to turn faith into a meritorious work. Paul explicitly contrasts faith with works in Romans 4. A beggar holding out his hands for food isn't earning the meal—he's begging for it. Faith has zero merit; all the credit and power belong to the Savior who pulls you out of the water. The difference isn't that I boast in man's ability; it's that I don't worship a God whose "sovereign mercy" looks like cosmic favoritism, which of course the Bible declare God does not show favoritism.

You dress up a nightmare in pious academic jargon to avoid the horrific core of your own system: on your view, God intentionally brought my children into this world born totally unable to believe, refused to spill a single drop of Christ's blood to atone for their sins, sovereignly withholds the only grace that could ever enable them to turn to Him, and will damn them to eternal hell for failing to do what He actively ensured they could never do, all for His own “glory.” You can deflect behind “secret decrees” and lecture me about who can know what, but you can’t hide the math: if your five points are true, you sit at dinner with your family worshiping a God who may have created your own flesh and blood merely as disposable fuel for the fire.

That must be why you all argue so fiercely and seem so desperate. It appears you've based your theology on shaky ground, and your entire philosophy collapses when it's found not to align with biblical teachings put more in line with the Manicheans of the first 300 years of Christianity.

Larry, just because a philosophical system is internally logical doesn't make it true. A faulty premise can produce a perfectly consistent conclusion that is completely false. The entire foundation of Calvinism stands or falls on Augustine's premise of inherited guilt and total inability, concepts heavily shaped by his early immersion in Manichaean Gnosticism. That foundational premise directly contradicts Scripture. In Ezekiel 18:20, God explicitly states, "The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son." Holding men accountable for an inherent, decreed inability they had no hand in receiving violates God's own definition of righteous judgment. For the last 10 years, I've been trying to eliminate what I call the Augustinian deviation from my understanding of Scripture. Once that baggage is removed, the Scriptures seem to open up and make a lot more sense, at least for me. I believe it is a big mistake to brush aside 1 Corinthians 13. Scripture defines the very nature of God by declaring that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). It never says "God is justice" or "God is wrath." Justice and wrath are relational responses to sin in creation, but love is who God is eternally within the Trinity, before anything existed. Before the foundation of the world, there was no sin to judge, yet the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existed in eternal, perfect love. Calvinism takes temporal, relational attributes and elevates them above God's essential nature, redefining His love to fit a deterministic mold. If God defines love in 1 Corinthians 13 as not seeking its own, not delighting in evil, and bearing all things, then His interaction toward His creation must reflect that standard. It's not trying to be polemic, but I believe you are relying on Sola Interpretation through an Augustinian lens rather than Sola Scriptura. If Jesus doesn't truly love His enemies according to the 1 Corinthians 13 definition, then I believe Jesus would not be the perfect, spotless Lamb and could not be the Savior of the world. I also have to push back hard on how you presuppose your framework onto the narrative texts. It really is a doctrine looking for a text. Because of your deterministic lens, you look at Joseph's story and claim God had to deterministically decree every evil act to accomplish His purpose. Under your view, for God to get Joseph into prison, He had to be the controlling cause behind the lust of Potiphar's wife. In that framework, the sexual excitement and lustful desire that she had was first created in the mind of God under the Augustinian system. You can try to soften that with compatibilist language, but in a closed deterministic system, God is effectively both the arsonist and the firefighter. That view hands sinners the ultimate excuse: "God made me do it." It's like that old Flip Wilson routine from the 70s, "the devil made me do it," except here it's God. Under theistic determinism, God ends up being the ultimate author and orchestrator of every wicked act, making evil a necessary part of His eternal decree. For God to be God or sovereign doesn't mean He has to author every evil desire. My reading of the Scriptures is that true sovereignty is God's ability to take genuine, rebellious human choices, like the hatred of Joseph's brothers or the lust of Potiphar's wife, and weave them into His redemptive purposes without ever having to author the wickedness Himself. I typically don't quote men, but I think A.W. Tozer's description is extremely helpful. God Almighty is sovereign, free to do as He pleases. Among the things He is pleased to do is give me freedom to do as I please. And when I do as I please, I am fulfilling the will of God, not controverting it, for God in His sovereignty has sovereignly given me freedom to make a free choice. Even if the choice is not the one God would have made for me, His sovereignty is fulfilled in my making the choice...

Did you even read what I said? This is the same church who created the creeds that you and I embrace. We need to consider their criticism of their critique of Calvinism. It doesn't make it right necessarily but we should be humble enough to be able to at least examine the merits of their arguments. The things I agree with them I stand side by side, like ancestral sin and there rejection of augustinianism. I'm not fighting with the Orthodox they're not on my radar, it's the Calvinists who have infiltrated our churches. Including mine which this young restless and reformed type completely destroyed.

I guess my post was too long here's the remainder To be honest, if I were forced at gunpoint to choose between theistic determinism and open theism, I would definitely lean toward the open view. Because of my understanding of how holy, perfect, and righteous God is, I would never want to imply that God is connected to evil, that He authored evil, or that evil is somehow necessary for us to praise Him for His goodness. When I stand before the judgment seat, if theistic determinism turns out to be true, I would far rather explain that I underestimated or failed to fully comprehend His raw power. But if it is not true, I would never want to stand before Him and try to justify why I believed He decreed evil, needed evil, or was behind the eternal destruction of souls He never intended to love. From a human perspective, it is far safer to misunderstand His power than it is to malign His character—which is the exact danger theistic determinism runs into. So least for me I could never be an augustinian or reformed in the calvinistic sense.

No I love discussing theology. I'm not really into sports, so God's word,history, theology, philosophy is what I thoroughly enjoy to discuss. This past weekend I had one of my son's over with his family and my three young grandkids so I was willingly tied up. I appreciate thoughtful, non-polemic dialogue. In my experience at some point, I usually get called a heretic and kicked out of the Kingdom, so I'm glad we can actually discuss this. I may not be as thorough as you, but let me try to address your main points. I try to view Scripture through the lens of who the author was writing to and about or at least that is my goal. Don't know who said this but I agree with the statement, the Bible was not written to me, but it was written for me. If I don't understand the real historical context, the who, the why, the where, the when the what I will completely mess with the sword of the spirit is trying to teach. So the context of John 6, Jesus is addressing Jewish listeners who were looking for a food creating political Messiah, while rejecting God's revelation. In that context, when Jesus speaks of the Father giving or enabling people to come, verse 45 explains: "Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me." To me, coming to Jesus is conditioned upon hearing and learning from the Father's prior revelation. John 5:39–47 shows that the Pharisees and leaders had hardened their hearts against the law and the prophets, so they couldn't recognize Jesus. It's really problematic when we turn a historical covenantal judgment on hardened first-century Israelites into a universal decree that God withholds saving grace from the majority of mankind from eternity past. That happens when you start with an Augustinian doctrine and search for a text to fit it.

Just to be clear, I am not Eastern Orthodox, and if I’m a heretic according to them, so be it, that wasn't my point. The interesting thing about the EO Church is that they reject the Augustinian presuppositions—or what I call the fundamental error that has steered Western Christianity for 1,500 years and created so many of the problems we are seeing played out even now. Specifically, the Manichaean influence on the doctrine of total depravity. The Orthodox reject the concept of being born guilty just by being created. Inherited guilt, in their view, is unbiblical and errant. I think the term they use is ancestral sin. After learning how deeply the Augustinian framework influenced my own Evangelical upbringing, I’ve come to appreciate the Eastern Church in that specific regard—even if only on that point. If the "T" in TULIP can be dismantled and shown to be an imported definition from pagan philosophy, every other letter in the acronym becomes unnecessary and the whole system crashes. Evangelicals in the West need a bit more humility to recognize that there have been two millennia of Christians working out their faith—some well, some not so well. If the historical tradition that helped give us the very creeds we embrace calls out Calvinism as heretical, that doesn't automatically make them right, but it should at least give us pause to examine why. I personally wouldn’t go as far as calling Calvinism heresy, but I would definitely say it is a tremendous error that ought to be rejected. Still, it is not a litmus test for whether someone is inside or outside the Kingdom.