Do you know how authors have to be kinda smart or no one will read them because their characters are boring and you can’t tell the difference between them? I’m just saying… if you apply the same reasoning to everyone around you and the question of “identity“… what does that say about determinism? Are we mere literary devices that can’t be told apart because nature/Author is unOriginal? Or is it pretty obvious there’s something else going on?
Isn’t it interesting… to go from “Vengeance/revenge is mine” (Omnipotent Original) to “Only the oppressed want revenge/vengeance, but they mask it in calling the oppressor evil” to “compassion is a looking down” (from Omnipotence???) or… is it from the point of view of the receiver…?
… reaping the whirlwind … from a pathos of distance … or is it the herd instinct?
Did John Calvin Believe in Free Will?
MATTHEW BARRETT at the TGC website
Of course, to the best of my knowledge, Calvin wasn’t actually there in the Garden of Eden to observe all of this. Like most, he read the account in the Bible. Which he then presumed it to be true because it is the word of God. And then presumed, what, that he must presume this because he did not possess the free will not to?
Again, that’s where it always gets tricky. To reject free will is always to reject your own. So whatever you think, feel, say or do in regard to the Christian God you were never able not to. Only, as with most of us, Calvin was not actually able to demonstrate this such that his own account of Adam was indisputably not one that he had opted for autonomously.
And he can only presume that Adam himself was not compelled by God to bring about Original Sin. Or was he? Does an omniscient God already know that Adam would eat the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? Was he really ever able to opt freely not to?
How can this not be completely confusing without God Himself setting it all straight?
And yet there are over 2 billion Christians around the globe who don’t seem to grasp that. Or, perhaps, in not grasping it, they are unwittingly in sync with God’s will?
Let’s face it though, sin takes on a whole new meaning if you were never able not to sin. And if, whether you do or do not, the fate of your eternal soul had already been decided by God…at or around the time of the Big Bang?
Still, it really comes down to how Calvin was actually able to demonstrate this beyond insisting that he was never able to demonstrate it beyond being fated to believe it.
I mean, in all seriously, what could you have told him to get around that?