As if God himself ordained, decreed, chose, and decided for Paul himself to kick against the goads.
No, the Bible everywhere supports libertarian free will.
You've gone to a lot of trouble to write this, and wrote it in a kind tone, and I can appreciate that. So I will try to answer it carefully, without the scorn and derision that has been characteristic of so many posts here lately.
I would urge you, if you are willing, to examine again you presuppositions you may be unaware of. And if you would like to see truly the best the other side has to offer, take the time to read this short Biblical proof of libertarian will, it is only a 5 minute read. Now I do not accept the Trinity because it is explicitly declared in Scripture. And this is true of libertarian freedom. Hence, the philosophical notion of libertarian freedom is under the same umbrella. The Trinity is deduced from Scripture logically, not explicitly stated, and libertarian free will can also be conclusively deduced from Scripture.
Let's not forget, though, that we all —not just Calvinists— read with presuppositions. I have decided not to call myself a Calvinist (as such) nor even Reformed, though that (those?) are as close a well-known system gets to what I believe, but I too am aware that I presuppose many things. But, again, so does everyone. I am a monergist. I know many things for fact. But I can be wrong. I try to keep that in mind, but it is hard not to presuppose, when those who counter me claim things line up with Scripture, but not with logic. FOR WHAT IT IS WORTH, I did not grow up a Calvinist (nor Reformed), nor have I been indoctrinated in Calvinism, nor in Reformed Theology. I disagree completely that libertarian free will can be conclusively deduced from Scripture. I find that God having ordained —indeed, caused— ALL things, both scriptural and logical. But ...let's continue...
First let's talk a little about what libertarian free will is not—
1. It's not the ability to do absolutely anything.
2. It's not the guarantee of no influencing forces.
3. It's not the ability to produce self-righteousness.
4. It is not randomness—this straw man caricature would mean choice is not under control of an agent, like a slot machine.
1)
Not the ability to absolutely anything. Obviously. It would be silly, not to mention, irrelevant, to beat that little bit of air.
2)
Not the guarantee of no influencing forces. Well, thank you for that. Some of your "kind" would disagree, claiming that libertarian free means just that. Not that the forces don't attempt to influence, but that they are not successful in doing so.
3)
Not the ability to produce self-righteousness. This is almost a repeat of number 1, except that many who believe in libertarian free will somehow think that the 'mind of the flesh' can contradict Romans 8 and produce saving faith, pleasing God.
4)
Not randomness —not quite a strawman:. It's not that choice is not under control of an agent, but that the agent —man— under LFW is somehow relegated to first cause status, or, if not, he has randomly been influenced to choose as he does, if God is not the one who causes all things (whether directly or through means). The influence is there, no matter how small and weak, no matter the source, the cumulative effect of all influences, external and internal, "adding their sum to the sum of their differences", and so —again, if God is not the original cause of all things— what influences man is random (which is, to my thinking, a self-contradictory notion).
Free will is the limited ability to select between certain limited options as ordained and circumscribed by God's created order.
Agreed. Note there, though, the word 'options'. So far, the notion, "possibilities", is not implied.
Just as the Trinity can be deduced from whatever passages you want to cite, so true autonomous decision can be from this passage (as well as hundreds of others, but this passage is sufficient and a good example). So let's take a fairly mundane seeming passage and extrapolate some ideas from it.
Do you and me a favor, for the sake of our discussion, and read through what you write below, including the quote, with an attempt to see your own presuppositions.
3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, "Indeed you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man's wife."
4 But Abimelech had not come near her; and he said, "Lord, will You slay a righteous nation also?
5 "Did he not say to me,`She is my sister '? And she, even she herself said,`He is my brother.' In the integrity of my heart and innocence of my hands I have done this."
6 And God said to him in a dream, "Yes, I know that you did this in the integrity of your heart. For I also withheld you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her.
7 "Now therefore, restore the man's wife; for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you shall live. But if you do not restore her, know that you shall surely die, you and all who are yours." (Gen 20:3-7 NKJ)
We have to set this up so bear with me. At first God says to Abimelech that he is a dead man because he has sinned. Abimelech answers and implies that this is too harsh a judgment in the light of his current limitations of understanding the situation. Abimelech then declares he is innocent. In verse 6, God does not say Abimelech is wrong, but rather affirms that Abimelech is actually correct on this issue. He has done this "in the integrity" of his heart. Then God says he has somehow kept Abimelech from sinning so far as an act of mercy because of ignorance. But now Abimelech is no longer considered ignorant, as he has been warned, so we end with verse 7 in which God lays out two different outcomes that are both indicated to be a real possibility and determined by the choice Abimelech makes.
Notice here, that you combine things the text does not, and miss something the text does imply. You combined: "God says he has somehow kept Abimelech from sinning so far as an act of mercy because of ignorance." You read that into it —I think— because of your presuppositions.
It does not say it. You have the causation there backwards. What it does say, and you missed:
"You did this in the integrity of your heart. For I also withheld you from sinning..." Notice the preposition, "for". Let me offer a slightly different rendition, just to illustrate my point —not to claim this rendition is more accurate— : "You did this in the integrity of your heart
because I withheld you from sinning..." God is implying to Abimelech that his integrity in the matter was a
result of God restraining what Abimelech would (might?) otherwise have done. Now, I easily admit that I am most likely reading at least one presupposition into that, just as you are.
So, I do grant, at least, that God
did consider Abimelech innocent of the [supposed] crime
because of Abimelech's ignorance.
Honesty is an attribute of God, and honesty in communication is necessary if you want to be understood in the way you intend to say something. "God is not a man that he should lie," says the Divine. That is, in general, if you wish to convey information and not mislead someone, you actually have to mean what you say.
Let's rewrite that presupposition as I think you mean to apply it. (We are not talking about 'you', a man.) Thus:
"Honesty is an attribute of God, and honesty in communication is necessary if [God] want to be understood in the way [God] intend[ed] to say something. "God is not a man that he should lie," says the Divine. That is, in general, if [God] wish[es] to convey information and not mislead someone, [God] actually ha to mean what [he] say."
First, you haven't established that God did not mean to mislead anyone, for he does so elsewhere in scripture, and on purpose. Now, I admit, that fact may be immaterial here, because it would seem that God was not intending to mislead Abimelech.
Second, there simply is no way for the depth of the wisdom of God to make its way into the mind of man in this temporal frame. We are not built to handle that. God does not try to convey everything he means, in one gulp. He tells Abimelech enough for their conversation, and not much more. He only tells Abimelech what he means to convey, which is quite naturally dumbed down for Abimelech's sake, and, let's admit it, for our sake. There is a LOT of anthropomorphism in Scripture, done by God, on purpose, for our sakes. No, I am not saying that God is lying or misleading when he does that, but that what he means to convey for that hearer is only what he says. The implications WE take from it all too often, are, as you suggest above, a result of our presuppositions. (I will not, at this point, take that last sentence of mine and drive it home here. I trust that there is no need.)
I find it compelling enough that I want to doxologize, here, a bit: One thing about the Word of God —Scripture, I mean— that is amazing, is that God can say something in our temporal language, and the more we learn about him the more that 'something' begins to mean to us. Amazingly, also, is his patience and wisdom, in allowing us to get a little bit more understanding, while "getting it all wrong", so that we can learn some more. He lets us sometimes keep many of our presuppositions, and even our worldviews, our point-of-view, though mistaken, for the rest of our lives. If Calvinism (Monergism, I say) gets it all wrong, at least suppose us to be brothers in Christ with you, as we do you with us. (Yes, I know we don't all).
We cannot claim Abimelech would understand this passage in any deterministic way, and if determinism were true it would not be beyond the capacity of God to phrase this in a deterministic way or even to explain that Abimelech actually has no libertarian choice in the matter and there are not two real, viable outcomes as God indicated, where Abimelech either "surely dies" or he will in fact "live" although he was declared dead already, which in this case would indicate he had a pending "death sentence," or ban, on him.
No, agreed, God could do that differently. Why do you assume he would do that differently, if different was more accurate? I find him dealing with most people just as you show him speaking to Abimelech, yet, without coming out and saying, nor even necessarily implying that the truth is only that man has libertarian free will. Could it be that God allows us to continue to pursue him 'our own way' by speaking to us according to our understanding —our presuppositions? Could he not slowly expose us to the truth, instead of explaining it all each time he speaks?
Now the truth about determinism is a sneaky one, because no matter how you phrase something to sound like autonomy, you can always just claim it only sounds that way as some kind of illusion.
I'm not sure why you are saying this. Why would I want to phrase something to sound like autonomy? Do you mean, "...no matter how God phrases something to sound like autonomy..."? Remember the two things I mentioned above. Plus, here, you make it sound like —that is, if it is God phrasing it— to purposely sound like autonomy [PERIOD]. That has not been demonstrated. To one person, rather obviously, of a certain mindset, it sounds like autonomy. To another, of another mindset, it does not. God is not obligated to justify all misunderstandings. I think, rather, that we should stand amazed and thank him for his patience and forbearance with our foolish presuppositions, and his gentle leading.
But the default position of any text should not to be take the plain meaning as an illusion, but to take it as meaning what it says, unless we have strong overriding context. With proponents of determinism, a small percentage of Bible verses that could possibly be interpreted as deterministic are used as an overriding lens to reinterpret a much, much larger majority percentage of thousands of passages that are made to sound deliberately as if choice were two or more actual outcomes decided by the individual, instead of pre-decided by God.
Don't suppose that numbers of one sort compare with numbers of another sort. That is faulty logic all on its own, but particularly when the number changes considerably when the POV of the reader is brought into the mix. The numbers of people who think one way vs another is irrelevant to the truth; the numbers of contexts (or outright statements, even) that imply one thing to a reader, compared to the numbers of contexts (or outright statements) that imply something else to that same reader, is irrelevant to the truth. And, it is not mathematical sizes we are concerned with, anyway, but the whole council of God.
And this overriding persupposition becomes so second nature to the Calvinist, that, in my interaction with determinists anyway, they almost seem to think it's the natural way to interpret choices in Scripture as necessarily deterministic when that's actually not the default way to understand them.
How do you know it is not the default way to understand them? (Do you think Scripture is not logical? It only defies understanding sometimes —not logic.) You only presuppose that that is the default way to understand them, and I think, because that is the way you are used to reading them —it seems to you the most reasonable— because of your presuppositions.
By the way, the presuppositions you list are far from the only ones, and some are not at all, that I presuppose concerning LFW.
If God wanted to convey a deterministic meaning of any kind to Abimelech it would have been easy, simple and clear to simply phrase what God says to Abimelech in a deterministic way, "I have chosen you to sin," or "you will go on and do what I have decided for you to do," or "you must fulfill your destiny and this is what it will be." God does not choose any of those easy options which would be honest and clear, to phrase something deliberately in a way that sounds non-deterministic, and this is not by any definition the honest way of communicating. Abimelech, if Calvinism were true, would have been misled by God.
Read the above, to keep this from going longer than the too-long it has already gone.
So although we have verses where Jesus says "the only true God" in reference to his Father, we take the higher percentage of verses and reinterpret the lower percentage of verses, to justify our interpretation that Jesus himself is the only true God as well. In the same way Scripture actually ends up directly supporting the idea of libertarian freedom, instead of directly opposing the idea of libertarian freedom, as many Calvinists contend.
No. But read above again. In fact, a Unitarian in another forum who denies the Godhood of Christ, uses that very logic to make his conclusion. He assumes the plain reading, in so many places, of "Son of Man", outweighs "Son of God", because he presupposes "Son of Man" to only be a reference to Jesus' humanity, when it is not. "But", he protests, when this is pointed out, "it is the plain reading."
So by using the exact same "hermeneutics" we would use to come to a deduction of the Trinity, we come with this consistent and predominantly used method of interpreting the Bible, to describing choices as multiple potential outcomes determined by the agent.
Sorry, but, no, as I show above.
A Calvinist cannot "walk through the text" when reading from "the original Hebrew" and stay a consistent exhaustive divine determinist in Genesis chapter 20.
A Calvinist can work ("walk"?) through the text when reading from the original Hebrew, and stay a consistent exhaustive divine determinist in Genesis chapter 20 —and many of them do.
Now: Understand something here, that what one person means by 'exhaustive divine determinism' is usually not quite the same as what someone else means by it; or perhaps to say it better, does not find the same implications from the phrase as another, nor do the same protests come to mind even in those who oppose it.
But this post has run way long.
