PREFACE
This work deals with the issues of Calvinistic Protestantism surrounding the notion that God chooses some people for salvation and rejects others. It shows how the Bible sees nothing worthy in human nature even to the extent that God gives you faith and it is all his work and it is the only thing that is necessary for salvation.
Augustine of Hippo taught something similar to basic Calvinism and Gottschalk of Orbais, who probably died in 867 AD, developed his doctrines further and taught predestination to salvation or damnation. It is foolish to imagine that the ideas of Calvinism were original. They were not.
If you read the Catholic Encyclopaedia on Gottschalk you will read that Catholic doctrine is that if God foresees that you will sin then he does not wish you to be saved. That is not far from the Calvinist doctrine that there are people God wants banned from Heaven. The only difference is that in Catholicism, God wants you damned because it is your choice. In Calvinism, God wants you damned because it is his choice and it has nothing to do with what you do or don't do.
Jesus said it was his decision not yours if you are to know God. He said that nobody knows God unless the son - himself - reveals God. Matthew 11:27. It is a clear statement in favour of the malevolent doctrine of predestination - that good works have nothing to do with salvation and it is all about how God chooses you. Jesus argued that the universe was God and would probably have argued that God has the right to ban people from salvation just because he doesn't want to save them. If predestination is an evil doctrine then it is a sin to believe in it and a sin to believe in Jesus.
“There’s not a single passage in the Bible that features an incompatiblist (contra-causal) account of free will. The simple fact of the matter is that the Holy Scriptures don’t mention the notion of free will at all.” God’s Undertakers.
My comment on that is: Believers say the Bible assumes it but makes no effort to define free will. They say it is there for the Bible says you are so accountable for your actions that if you sin you will be held responsible for it for all eternity and be punished forever. But considering how many religions and philosophers have talked about responsibility without believing in free will or understanding it correctly that is a bad argument.
There is no proper free will in the Bible so God predestines you to sin or to go to Heaven or Hell.
PREDESTINATION
Predestination can mean that God manipulates a person through memories, thoughts and feelings to freely but inevitable choose him or it can mean that God forces your will to act as if it freely chooses salvation but it is not free at all. The first retains free will which is shaped by our environment and inner soul anyway. The latter is fatalism.
The Bible says that when you are saved by God you are born again. Jesus says you must be born a second time. This seems to suggest that as you were not responsible for being born once you are not really responsible for being born again and it is all God's doing. You are just destined to be born again and your free will is programmed to allow it to happen.
What can be confusing is the way believers use the idea of free will. Calvinist Christians who believe in predestination hold that we do not have free will in the sense that we can choose good or evil by ourselves. We have only the power to choose evil and we want to be evil so we have free will only to do evil. The choosing we do is just between different kinds of evil. They reject the Romanist doctrine that you can choose good as well as evil.
The Bible certainly teaches that the good works done by the unbeliever or the believer before real conversion to Christ are really sins of hypocrisy. This is the doctrine of total depravity. Since we do nothing but sin clearly the only way we can be saved is if God does all the work. He has to predestine us to conversion and salvation.
The doctrine of total depravity does not mean that we will do all the violence we can do but that all the good we do is really just hypocrisy and we do all the evil we can and only act good so that we can carry on with our addiction to sin.
Predestination is expressed in the Calvinist Protestant idea that God chooses who is to be saved and not the saved. Unconditional Election is the doctrine that God chooses certain people for salvation not because of anything they have done or will do but just because he wants to. When God completely ignores merit it is obvious that this has to be arbitrary and is fatalism though not the extreme kind of fatalism that says that we have no free will at all. If we have no merit even when we choose saving faith it must follow that we are programmed to exercise this faith even if we are not programmed regarding anything else.
THE RICH MAN AND LAZARUS
Jesus told his sinister and cynical story of the rich man and Lazarus. It is not a parable by the way. He does not tell us its real meaning for he thought it was a real event. He claims that there is no point in the rich man rising from the dead to warn his evil brothers to repent. He is in Hades and cannot bear the torment and asks Abraham to send Lazarus to put a drop of water on his tongue for a second's relief. Jesus approves of how Abraham told him that those men have the Law and the Prophets and if they won't hear them then somebody rising from the dead will be no help. This encourages the Calvinist notion that if one has not been helped by God to find him, it is because God knows he would not respond affirmatively anyway. One cannot believe and teach that and then with a straight face claim to love and respect the sinner.
Imagine its scope. Jesus did say he marvelled at how much Israel lacked faith. He praised a Roman centurion for having better faith than anybody in Israel. So most Jews in his view were not responding to God and never would.
THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
Jesus gave us the parable of the talents. It represents God giving you gifts. God condemned the man who put the gift safely away and gave it back to God. He wanted the man to build on the gift and come back with more. It is pointed out that Calvinism teaches that God chooses who will be saved and who will suffer the just penalty of their sin. Jesus saves you and gives you back to God. There is no profit here. God only gets back what he gave in the first place. Jesus in the gospel of Luke does say that even if you do all God requires you can only go to him and bemoan that you did nothing special and it was only your duty. The doctrine of creation indeed does say all that we have and are comes from God completely. So he may let us sin but that is still control for we are acting under his permission.
Human nature wants religion to reflect the parable of the talents. It cannot if there is a God. lt is that simple. Jesus was not a theologian and contradicted himself assuming the gospels report him accurately.
CONCLUSION
Born-again Protestantism is the religion of the Bible and the Roman Catholic Church is not Christian according to the Bible. Born-again Protestantism is bad news so the Bible is bad news too.
WORKS CONSULTED
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Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1983
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BIBLE TRANSLATION USED
The Amplified Bible