Yes, God willed the crucifixion and humans freely murdered Jesus.BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc HollidayThe fundamental flaw in your framework is that it replaces an ongoing, living covenant with a static legal transaction, and it does this both in your view of salvation and your view of the atonement. said:Quote:Quote:Quote:Quote:
You find comfort in OSAS because it offers impenetrable security, but that security comes at a dangerous cost. In a real, covenantal relationship, basically like a marriage, security exists with continuous nurture, repentance, and mutual fidelity. When salvation is reduced to a past transaction ("my ticket is punched"), the urgency to fight sin, mortify the flesh, and practice daily repentance is stripped away.
When you try to claim OSAS doesn't lead to passivity because "true faith" naturally produces good works, it forces you into a false dilemma:
- You accept theological determinism (that faith acts as a deterministic force overriding future human agency). That's calvinism and you said you don't really agree.
Neither option aligns with Christian humility, human experience, or the Patristic understanding of ascesis which is the continuous struggle of abiding in Christ (John 15). The reality of the Christian walk is often the exact opposite: the deeper my faith grows, the more clearly I see how broken I actually am. Growth doesn't make repentance obsolete: it makes repentance more urgent. It forces the realization that we have to labor continuously so that Christ can work within us.
- You embrace spiritual triumphalism (that your initial moment of faith was so uniquely profound that it permanently fixed your heart against future apostasy). This is really what you're pointing to.
This transactional view of salvation makes sense only because you've paired it with PSA. In your view, salvation isn't really about Christ conquering death and restoring communion so we can partake in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Instead, God is subordinated to an abstract principle of penal justice that demands bloodshed and suffering to appease His wrath. When the Gospel is reduced to dodging the crosshairs of divine wrath in a courtroom, a contractual, transactional salvation makes sense. But if the Gospel is about healing, union, and covenantal life with God, then both PSA and OSAS fall apart.
Jesus Christ reveals a God who is fundamentally different from the God of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA).Quote:
"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil... Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 5:38-45)
I know how uncomfortable it can feel to pull on these threads, especially when doctrines like OSAS or Penal Substitution are presented as the baseline of 'biblical Christianity.' But I want to encourage you: don't be afraid to test and challenge what you've been handed by Protestant tradition.
Testing these views isn't stepping away from God or disrespecting Scripture. It's actually stepping into the deeper, older history of the Christian faith: the Patristic understanding held by the early Church for over a millennium before Western scholasticism turned salvation into a courtroom.
Obviously, your theology is shapened by your own understanding and philosophy and your church's tradition, and not by Scripture - in other words, by man's word and understanding, not God's word. In fact, in order to uphold your view you have to push Scripture to the side as a secondary authority, even directly contradicting it altogether. Compounding this problem is that your thinking is cluttered with what seems like a continuous stream of straw men, flawed analogies, and logical non sequiturs - and despite all attempts to get you to recognize them, they're only being repeated like a broken record.
- Atonement and salvation are not being treated like a "legal transaction". Blood had to be spilled. A real, significant price had to be paid in our stead. Calling it a mere legal transaction diminishes Jesus' sacrifice.
- A marital covenant is not made null by the failure to meet spousal obligations. That's MAN'S idea of marriage, not God's. "What God has joined, let man not separate". Salvation is adoption into God's family. The failures of the adopted son does not nullify his sonship. You even acknowledged that you wouldn't do this yourself if you adopted a son. Marriage and sonship, especially in God's eyes, are not merit-based.
- Faith is not a "ticket being punched" that ends all desires within the believer for sanctification. In these discussions, it's quite clear that you do not understand at all what faith really is, and the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer.
But instead of rehashing all the flaws in your argument against OSAS, atonement, justification, salvation, etc. let's focus back onto the topic - do you acknowledge that God's "decree" of what a person believes does not necessarily entail compelling those beliefs, even in the Calvinist view? I'll ask these questions again, because they weren't just rhetorical, I really would like a response:You: "I know how uncomfortable it can feel to pull on these threads, especially when doctrines like OSAS or Penal Substitution are presented as the baseline of 'biblical Christianity.' But I want to encourage you: don't be afraid to test and challenge what you've been handed by Protestant tradition." -- pure irony.
- Do you believe BOTH that God decreed every word of Scripture... AND that Scripture was the product of man's own chosen words and non-compelled beliefs?
- Do you believe BOTH that God desires, and commands, that man never commits murder... AND that God willed/decreed that man murder Jesus?
Let me get this straight: you actually believe you're reading Scripture in some pure, unmediated vacuum without a human brain getting in the way? That's not 'biblical fidelity', that's an obscene level of hermeneutical pride.
You've fallen headfirst into the illusion of the neutral interpreter. You sit there confusing your own private, 21st-century Western OSAS reading of the text with the raw voice of Almighty God Himself, and then have the nerve to accuse anyone who challenges your interpretation of 'rejecting Scripture.'
Newsflash: Scripture doesn't read itself. The moment you open the book, the text passes through your fallible human mind, your cultural biases, and the post-Reformation legal categories you were handed. Pretending you don't have a tradition or an interpretive framework doesn't mean you don't have one...it just means yours is invisible to you. You aren't defending the authority of God's Word: you're just crowning yourself your own personal pope.
Must be nice to be the one guy in 2,000 years who reads the Bible with zero bias, zero human philosophy, and zero interpretive error. Let's stop pretending. You aren't fighting for 'what the Bible clearly says'; you're fighting for your private interpretation of what it says. Elevating your personal, fallible reading to the level of divine decree.
What you are doing right now is repeating the exact epistemological tragedy of the Early Reformation. When the Reformers claimed their private readings were 'just what Scripture says,' they couldn't handle disagreement, because in their minds, disagreeing with their reading was disagreeing with God Himself. That hubris is precisely why Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli condemned, anathematized, and even executed other Christians who read the same Bible differently. You are standing in that exact same tradition of hermeneutical pride. You confuse your legal interpretation with the unmediated voice of God, and then accuse anyone who challenges you of 'rejecting Scripture.' It was an impossible, dangerous illusion in the 1500s, and it's an impossible, dangerous illusion in this debate.
Here are just a few examples of what I'm talking about, how your view CLEARLY contradicts Scripture. We're talking literal, direct, word for word contradictions with the plain language of Scripture. We're not talking about needing any kind of special interpretive ability here:
1) According to your view, we CAN'T know that we are saved even if we believe. But Scripture directly says that if we believe, we CAN know we are saved (1 John 5:13).
2) You define "faith" as an "activity"; but Scripture explicitly defines faith as a "conviction" and an "assurance" (Hebrews 11:1) which are dispositions of the heart, and involves NO activity whatsoever.
3) Your view is that salvation is by faith AND works - when the clear, explicit testimony of Scripture is that we are saved by faith, NOT works (Ephesians 2:8-9).
.... and many more.
I just don't see how you can argue with a straight face that these examples are based on a biased interpretation of Scripture. Seeing the difference between "CAN" and "CAN'T" just isn't something that requires arcane, hermeneutical expertise.
And you still haven't answered the questions that I posed:
- Do you believe BOTH that God decreed every word of Scripture... AND that Scripture was the product of man's own chosen words and non-compelled beliefs?
- Do you believe BOTH that God desires, and commands, that man never commits murder... AND that God willed/decreed that man murder Jesus?
To answer your questions:
Do I believe God inspired every word of Scripture AND that the authors wrote freely? Yes. This is called Synergy (cooperative divine-human action). God works in and through human volition without destroying human agency, just as Christ is fully God and fully man without His humanity being erased. You're attempting to take divine inspiration which is a unique, holy act of guiding sacred text and then extrapolate it to mean God sovereignly decrees and renders certain every evil thought, rape, murder, and act of unbelief in human history. Equating the inspiration of holy Scripture with the divine decree of human damnation and sin is a gross category error.
Did God command against murder AND decree the death of Jesus? Yes, but you are confusing sovereign foreknowledge/redemption with exhaustive determinism. God foreknew the free, evil intentions of sinful men and used their violence to bring about redemption (Acts 2:23). Allowing human evil to execute a redemptive sacrifice is radically different from claiming God caused or decreed their wickedness. If God actively decrees that men must commit murder, and then condemns them to hell for committing the very murder He decreed, God is the author of sin and His moral commands are a farce.
- I didn't ask you if you believe God "inspired" every word of Scripture, I asked if you believe he "decreed" every word. I'll assume that your answer is still "yes". Then, you are doing what the Calvinists are doing with their doctrine - accepting that both conflicting ideas exist together in a divine mystery. Calvinism does not hold that God "renders every evil thought, rape, murder and act of unbelief" (you're still caricaturing it, you can't resist, can you?). It holds that God "decrees" it, while humans are still the ones doing it on their own - which you agree can be possible, given your agreement to the question. That was the point.
- Again, you're changing up words. This is what you do, and it's not honest. I didn't ask if you believe "God commanded against murder AND decree the death of Jesus". I asked if you believe God DESIRES and COMMANDS that man never murder, AND that he also WILLED/DECREED that man murder Jesus. I'll again assume your answer is yes - am I correct? And if so, then you should be able to understand the Calvinist position how God can DESIRE that all men be saved.... AND WILL/DECREE that NOT all men be saved at the same time.
But here's where it breaks: the crucifixion is a singular redemptive event. Individual damnation isn't. God's decree of the crucifixion doesn't preclude genuine synergy in ongoing salvation: it's not predestining each person's response to grace.
Your framework requires God to predestine not just the event, but each individual's rejection of salvation. Those aren't equivalent. And we're back to the core problem: even granting your analogy, TULIP still needs Compatibilism to make it cohere. Which means you've abandoned monergism to save monergism. That's the incoherence.
