Thanks for the post. Please don’t give up on what you’re looking through on the site.

(1) That God is unchangeable (”immutable”) is one of His glorious, fundamental, identifying characteristics. It is true of Him in general– “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?” (Numbers 23); and it is true of Him as it relates to Him saving His elect– “they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord; and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48).

(2) I wonder which “branch of Christianity” you are referring to. Although the details of the Canons are not confessed except by the Reformed and the Presbyterians, its predestinarian substance is prominent in many even competing historic Christian traditions (eg, the Augustinian strand of Roman Catholicism, the Martin Luther-ish strand of Lutheranism), ALL which ground the doctrine in God’s immutable will .

(3) If you have a problem with “assigning God a will,” your problem IS with Ephesians 1. I mean it says what it says, right? “he predestined us. . .in accordance with his pleasure and will”; “And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ”; “having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.” His will, His will, His will. There is a difference between basely interpreting God’s will, which open theism and Arminian does, and then there is another whole level of interpretive dysfunction that denies the very obvious category, or assigns it such and entirely different meaning as to render it nonsense, which you have done.

(4) Hard to defend your denial of Christianity as a legal system (depending on what you mean by it) when God gives us laws and will judge us someday, and when the bibical language describing our salvation is forensic (eg, “justification”). We also oppose legalistic interpretive systems and manmade moral rules. But not all systems of doctrine and moral rules are manmade. Some are biblical. As an example, the apostles systematize various parts of OT and even NT Scripture all the time into a coherent ideas. Hey, even your post is a mini-interpretive system, one I trust you do not think is legalistic.

(5) We do believe that all sinners may be saved if they ask for it. The only ones who will truly understand and acknowledge their sin, and flee to Christ alone for their salvation (”ask for it”), will be the elect, whom God has made alive out of their cold, dead heart to see their need and see their only hope.

amk

Foremost I reject the Dortian interpretation on Eph. 1.. What it says, is that we shall be grateful to God for our personal gifts aside from the salvation. The talk of “predestination” cannot be interpreted literally according to our limited human understanding, it fails logically if we are assigning God a “will”, free or otherwise.

Lastly: I reject the notion that Christianity is a legal system. It’s a “moral” system pinpointing for us how “things work” in a deeper meaning, but all development of moral, is a matter of personal spiritual seeking, not to be imposed upon us by any external legalist interpretation system. Only the salvation is by an external force, and that external force is God.

Me: Lutheran catholic, single predestination (the elect only), all sinners may be saved if they ask for it.

I think they are very related in my opinion.