It's about time to wrap up this thread and turn out the lights. Too much talking past one another, the questionable wording of the poll question, stident tones where pacific ones are meet.... It will be closed in a few hours at most, so say what you will and conclude.
This is my final contribution. There is only one gospel. We believe it is summarized in human language thoroughly, and much more extensively than is "necessary" for salvation, in our Reformed Creeds. Not, I say again, in some "form" or with certain specifics that have to be agreed on when one sees spiritually for the first time.
Possessing Christ is like being shown a new car, and being handed the keys to your wheels. Arminian theology has you standing behind the thing and pushing it. Now an Arminian church has a bunch of people who are all pushing their cars around, and a bunch of people pushing boulders around. "Hey, push one thing, push another thing; its all good as long as you're pushing! What are you doing getting inside that thing? You think your better than us? Get out and keep pushing." This is the essence of all false religion. This is what Paul warned the Galatians about.
But if someone is really embracing the Christ of the Bible, and not some ersatz Christ, he is a "calvinist" whether he knows it or not, whether he wants to be or not. If he belongs to Christ, and he has no more than Remonstrating theology to put flesh on his faith-bones, he will get it right in glory, though he may have been starving all his earthly life like a Somali refugee. Or, to carry the previous simile along, he'll start learing how to drive, finally, in heaven.
Here's the rub: since Arminianism is false, and takes away from Christ and his saving work, and detracts from God's glory, we can be certain that Satan enjoys using it to delude many people into hoping in vain. Does he also take delight in duping some into thinking they have hold of Christ, when they only have "hope" in their Calvinism? Without question he does. But there the Devil plays with fire. He works overtime to blind the intellect of a few, because they are in possession of the very tools the Holy Spirit uses to convict and convince sinners. They are like the Jews of Jesus day--isolated in their ethno-communities, possessing the "oracles of God" (Rom. 3:2), and who did "search the Scriptures" knowing that they held the key to eternal life (Jn. 5:39)--who nevertheless were blind to the One of whom they testified.
Ask yourself the question: if you were duping many, many people, would you prefer to use a ruse--a false story? Or would you prefer that the plain truth was widely disseminated and believed in form, but to expend countless individual labors to redirect each separate person's faith away from that to which the truth they possessed pointed? Isn't the missionary spread of the true gospel the Devil's death knell? Isn't he limited by his lack of omnipotence and omniscience? Isn't he bound?
See that Arminian over there? Maybe he's pushing a car. Maybe its a boulder. You don't know what he's pushing, because you can't see his heart. Go over there and share the value of the keys to a car.
This is my final contribution. There is only one gospel. We believe it is summarized in human language thoroughly, and much more extensively than is "necessary" for salvation, in our Reformed Creeds. Not, I say again, in some "form" or with certain specifics that have to be agreed on when one sees spiritually for the first time.
Possessing Christ is like being shown a new car, and being handed the keys to your wheels. Arminian theology has you standing behind the thing and pushing it. Now an Arminian church has a bunch of people who are all pushing their cars around, and a bunch of people pushing boulders around. "Hey, push one thing, push another thing; its all good as long as you're pushing! What are you doing getting inside that thing? You think your better than us? Get out and keep pushing." This is the essence of all false religion. This is what Paul warned the Galatians about.
But if someone is really embracing the Christ of the Bible, and not some ersatz Christ, he is a "calvinist" whether he knows it or not, whether he wants to be or not. If he belongs to Christ, and he has no more than Remonstrating theology to put flesh on his faith-bones, he will get it right in glory, though he may have been starving all his earthly life like a Somali refugee. Or, to carry the previous simile along, he'll start learing how to drive, finally, in heaven.
Here's the rub: since Arminianism is false, and takes away from Christ and his saving work, and detracts from God's glory, we can be certain that Satan enjoys using it to delude many people into hoping in vain. Does he also take delight in duping some into thinking they have hold of Christ, when they only have "hope" in their Calvinism? Without question he does. But there the Devil plays with fire. He works overtime to blind the intellect of a few, because they are in possession of the very tools the Holy Spirit uses to convict and convince sinners. They are like the Jews of Jesus day--isolated in their ethno-communities, possessing the "oracles of God" (Rom. 3:2), and who did "search the Scriptures" knowing that they held the key to eternal life (Jn. 5:39)--who nevertheless were blind to the One of whom they testified.
Ask yourself the question: if you were duping many, many people, would you prefer to use a ruse--a false story? Or would you prefer that the plain truth was widely disseminated and believed in form, but to expend countless individual labors to redirect each separate person's faith away from that to which the truth they possessed pointed? Isn't the missionary spread of the true gospel the Devil's death knell? Isn't he limited by his lack of omnipotence and omniscience? Isn't he bound?
See that Arminian over there? Maybe he's pushing a car. Maybe its a boulder. You don't know what he's pushing, because you can't see his heart. Go over there and share the value of the keys to a car.
BUT your comments make my point. Arminians tend to have knee-jerk, not thoughtful, reactions to Calvinism.
