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Calvinism doesnt let man off the hook. There is a balance of God’s divine sovereignty and providence, and yet man’s responsibility at the same time. A balance we will probably never understand fully.

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OK, I looked it up:

From The Sovereignty of God by A. W. Pink, page 95. Empasis points are by A. W. Pink:

What is will? We answer, the will is the faculty of choice, the immediate cause of all action. Choice necessarily implies the refusal of one thing and the acceptance of another. The positive and the negative must both be present to the mind before there can be any choice. In every act of will there is preference – the desiring of one thing rather than another. Where there is no preference, but complete indifference, there is no volition. To will is to choose, and to choose is to decide between alternatives. But there is something that influences the choice; something which determines the decision. Hence the will cannot be soverereign, because it is the servant of that something. The will cannot be both sovereign and servant. It cannot be both cause and effect. The will is not causative, because, as we have said, something causes it to choose; therefore that something must be a causative agent. Choice itself is affected by certain considerations, is determined by various influences brought to bear upon the individual himself; hence, volition is the effect of these considerations and influences, and if the effect, it must be their servant; and if the will is their servant then it is not sovereign, and if the will is not sovereign, we certainly cannot predicate the absolute “freedom” of it.

I say, Fyne Jr., that if you and I get the opportunity to meet in heaven that we take a walk down the golden street to the river, take a bite of whichever fruit is in season, and have a good chuckle over how neither of us had a complete understanding of these things while on earth.

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How do you fit that in with universalism?

Destruction is not necessarily the same thing as eternal damnation.

However, I’m not interested in defending this in detail in blog comments. It’s much too complex. I will recommend the books The Evangelical Universalist, by Gregory MacDonald, and The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott, and leave it at that.

If you’re not interested enough to read a book where the argument is made slowly, carefully and thoroughly, then there’s no point in my trying to convince you 100 words at a time.

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so you choose to say that Jesus did not die for all sins.

the unforgivable sin is not unbelief. it’s blasphemey against the holy spirit. I don’t want to derail the thread into this, i just wanted to point out how Jesus used the phrase.

In trying to follow your logic, if Christ died for all sins of the elect, and the unforgivable sin is not pardonable, then the elect did not commit the unforgivable sin. Since they have all put their faith in God it could not be that sin, so that seemed to be a good interpretation of Christ’s phrase. But that is working backwards and I agree that it is not worth debating in this thread.

Fyne, Jr. said:

Free will is the beginning of personal responsibility.

I never said that people don’t choose and aren’t responsible for their actions. I know that you call this free will. I am told that I live in a ‘free’ country but there are freedoms that I do not have. The answer to the question about whether or not I am truly ‘free’ in my country is analagous to me regarding free will. So I opt to say it is not free. To me this falls into the scope of Andree’s original post. I’m sorry you see it differently and I’ll drop the discussion.

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That is really really sad, but not new. Right from Eden. Adam blaming the wife (and God). The wife blaming the snake. Free will is the beginning of personal responsibility. A lack of it, and… well, you know the rest. Like I said before, it has a definition. Agree or disagree with it. Just don’t feed me this garbage about how you have your own (conveniently) custom made definition of free will. Nobody cares, since it applies to nobody in the real world.

“As concernedcitizen said in 45, if your soul is in bondage to sin is that influence or coercion? If your answer is different than mine, I’m OK with that.”

See my response to CC above.

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