Yes, Calvinists—free will IS in the Bible.

civic said:
I'm sorry to hear that brother. I'll see if I can get a few to back off with their assumptions /attacks.

Personally I think the word " Calvinist " is always perceived as what Calvin taught but there are many within that group that differ from what he taught, so we cannot lump everyone together and throw the baby out with the bath water. I read yesterday an article where many who are 3 or 4 point among many other differences from the calvinist of the 16th century consider themselves to be calvinists.

Flowers talks about some of that here

https://soteriology101.com/2017/05/20/you-dont-understand-calvinism/

There are moderate Calvinists, high Calvinists, ultra Calvinists and hyper Calvinists (the last of which most Calvinists would disavow completely). There are some who affirm God’s provisional atonement for all people and God’s sincere desire for every individual to repent and believe; but others who do not. There are some who affirm God’s genuine love for every individual, while others only describe his feelings toward the non-elect as wrath-filled hatred.

Those familiar with the lapsarian controversy, which has to do with the logical order of God’s eternal decrees of salvation, realize the complexities of rightly defining the various perspectives of Calvinism. This disagreement is ultimately centered around the “achilles heel” of the Calvinistic worldview: DIVINE CULPABILITY. How does God escape being held responsible for the origin and ultimate cause of all moral evil? Some Calvinists attempt to explain the logical order of the divine decree in such a way as to minimize His guilt for the fall and the origin of evil, while “higher” forms of Calvinism (typically called “Supralapsarianism”) simply embrace the troubling concept of double predestination and refer to “lesser” views of Calvinism as being “inconsistent.”

One scholar accurately observed:

Calvinists are seriously divided among themselves and always have been. There is Supralapsarianism vs. Sublapsarianism vs. Infralapsarianism. ‘The Supralapsarians hold that God decreed the fall of Adam; the Sublapsarians, that he permitted it’ (McClintock & Strong). The Calvinists at the Synod of Dort were divided on many issues, including lapsarianism. The Swiss Calvinists who wrote the Helvetic Consensus Formula in 1675 were in conflict with the French Calvinists of the School of Saumur. There are Strict Calvinists and Moderate Calvinists, Hyper and non-Hyper (differing especially on reprobation and the extent of the atonement and whether God loves all men), 5 pointers, 4 pointers, 3 pointers, 2 pointers. In America Calvinists were divided into Old School and the New School. As we have seen, the Calvinists of England were divided in the 19th century.

Whenever, therefore, one tries to state TULIP theology and then refute it, there are Calvinists who will argue with you that you are misrepresenting Calvinism. It is not so much that you are misrepresenting Calvinism, though. You might be quoting directly from various Calvinists or even from Calvin himself. The problem is that you are misrepresenting THEIR Calvinism! There are Calvin Calvinists and Thomas Fuller Calvinists and Arthur W. Pink Calvinists and Presbyterian Calvinists and Baptist Calvinists and many other sorts of Calvinists. Many Calvinists have never read Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion for themselves. They are merely following someone who follows someone who allegedly follows Calvin (who, by his own admission, followed Augustine)
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He can put me on ignore. He is whining.
 
Well this is close but not the one I was looking for.

"God's love as a strictly essential divine attribute, with justice as a derivative of love."
 
Aeliana said:
Well this is close but not the one I was looking for.

"God's love as a strictly essential divine attribute, with justice as a derivative of love."
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Here's a good one.


Because God is love, God is holy.

Because God is love, God is just.

We can only understand God’s holiness and justice when we consider them through the lens of God’s love. Through that lens, we see that God’s holiness never separates us from God, but draws us deeper into connection with God in spite of our sinfulness. Through that lens, we see that God’s justice does not condemn us, but delivers us into the fullness of who God created us to be.

God is love, and therefore God is holy and just. The rich beauty of this reality is that, because God loves everyone, God reaches out to us, connects with us, and refuses to allow us to suffer eternal torment.
randalljgreene.com

God's Holiness, Justice, and Love - Randall J. Greene

God's holiness and justness are products of God's love. They don't exist as independent characteristics, creating conflicts in God's character. Holiness and justice are outflows of God's nature, which is love.
randalljgreene.com
 
Dizerner said:
If I had a nickel for every time a Calvinist said to me "free will isn't in the Bible," I'd have a whole Nickelback album.


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 not explicitly stated, and free will can also be conclusively deduced from Scripture.


First let's talk a little about what 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.

Free will is the limited ability to select between certain limited options as ordained and circumscribed by God's created order.



Now let's take a fairly mundane seeming passage and extrapolate some ideas from it.

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)

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).

This is a long setup but 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Calvinist cannot "walk through the text" when reading from "the original Hebrew" and stay a consistent exhaustive divine determinist in Genesis chapter 20.

Peace to Spiritual Israel.
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If all your actions and thoughts were determined, would you still believe in free will?
 
TomL said:
If all your actions and thoughts were determined, would you still believe in free will?
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I've heard people try to use this as an argument against fatalism, but I do not think it logically pans out.

Obviously if God determined I believe in free will that would not mean free will is true or false.

Also, we cannot say, in my estimation, that free will is logically necessary for rational thought.

WLC and Turek both try to argue that we need LFW to make the determination of what is logically correct.

However, I do not see an actual connection between LFW and following the laws of logic.
 
Dizerner said:
I've heard people try to use this as an argument against fatalism, but I do not think it logically pans out.

Obviously if God determined I believe in free will that would not mean free will is true or false.

Also, we cannot say, in my estimation, that free will is logically necessary for rational thought.

WLC and Turek both try to argue that we need LFW to make the determination of what is logically correct.

However, I do not see an actual connection between LFW and following the laws of logic.
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It makes complete sense when one looks at Gods good nature and character. It truly expresses that God is love with LFW. Only determinists deny LFW. It’s a necessity with their theology. It goes hand in hand with their false view of Sovereignty.

hope this helps !!!
 
civic said:
It makes complete sense when one looks at Gods good nature and character. It truly expresses that God is love with LFW. Only determinists deny LFW. It’s a necessity with their theology. It goes hand in hand with their false view of Sovereignty. hope this helps !!!
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First of all, this does not have anything to do with the connection of LFW to beliefs, it's totally off-topic.

Second of all there are Universalist Determinists who think God will determine everyone to be saved in the end, and they would argue that you are limiting God's love more than they are.

There is another aspect to LFW besides the expression of genuine love, and that is the ability to obey and glorify God with it.
 
Dizerner said:
First of all, this does not have anything to do with the connection of LFW to beliefs, it's totally off-topic.

Second of all there are Universalist Determinists who think God will determine everyone to be saved in the end, and they would argue that you are limiting God's love more than they are.

There is another aspect to LFW besides the expression of genuine love, and that is the ability to obey and glorify God with it.
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Agree with last paragraph that’s the other side of the same coin I’m describing:)
 
Dizerner said:
I've heard people try to use this as an argument against fatalism, but I do not think it logically pans out.

Obviously if God determined I believe in free will that would not mean free will is true or false.

Also, we cannot say, in my estimation, that free will is logically necessary for rational thought.

WLC and Turek both try to argue that we need LFW to make the determination of what is logically correct.

However, I do not see an actual connection between LFW and following the laws of logic.
Click to expand...
It was a question?

If all your actions and thoughts were determined, would you still believe in free will?

If so, please explain.
 

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