Is Calvinism a form of Gnostic Christianity?

Where does Calvin say any of God's decisions are whims?You treat most of God's decisions as whims, according to this post, but there is no reason for that. Every decision has multiple causes as I said about 9/11. It isn't different when we're talking about the character of a person, because that too is formed by multiple causes, some we can even trace ourselves.abe: There is really nothing arbitrary about a single thing in reality or in the Bible, it all follows laws. Even if God "hardened Pharoah's heart" Pharoah is acting according to his own character and motives, there is nothing artificial or unpredictable in his behavior.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But of course there is scriptural support for such a capricious evil God. A classic example from the Bible is the Exodus myth and fable. The God character says "Let my people go" and the Pharaoh character says "Fine, I'll let them go". But the God character hardens Pharaoh's heart and makes him change his position so the God character sends a plague or kills all the first born or says "Who's up for gigin'?"That's what's so great about the Bible; you can support even the vile evil God Calvin marketed using scripture.Edited by jar, : fix sub-title

I don't think he uses that particular word. But it does seem to be an inevitable consequence of there being nothing outside of God's will. Can you see an error in my reasoning? And all of these causes are Calvin's God. God again.

I found so many quotations in the Institutes in so short a space of time that I stopped looking and threw away half of what I'd found. Here's Calvin on how whimsical God's decisions are, and why.* At last, he concludes that God hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth (Rom. ix. 18). You see how he refers both to the mere pleasure of God. We cannot assign any reason for his bestowing mercy on his people, but just that it so pleases him, neither can we have any reason for his reprobating others but his will. When God is said to visit in mercy or harden whom he will, men are reminded that they are not to seek for any cause beyond his will.* The sum is, that God by gratuitous adoption forms those whom he wishes to have for sons; but that the intrinsic cause is in himself, because he is contented with his secret pleasure.* Paul clearly declares that it is only when the salvation of a remnant is ascribed to gratuitous election, we arrive at the knowledge that God saves whom he wills of his mere good pleasure.* It is plainly owing to the mere pleasure of God that salvation is spontaneously offered to some, while others have no access to it.* God has always been at liberty to bestow his grace on whom he would. Not to ask in what respect the posterity of Abraham excelled others, if it be not in a worth, the cause of which has no existence out of God, let them tell why men are better than oxen or asses.* It is certainly easy to prove that the commencement of good is only with God, and that none but the elect have a will inclined to good. But the cause of election must be sought out of man; and hence it follows that a right will is derived not from man himself, but from the same good pleasure by which we were chosen before the creation of the world.* In man good will precedes many gifts from God; but among these gifts is this good will itself. (August. Enchiridion ad Laurent. cap. 32). Whence it follows, that nothing is left for the will to arrogate as its own. This Paul has expressly stated. For, after saying, It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do, he immediately adds, of his good pleasure (Phil. ii. 13); indicating by this expression, that the blessing is gratuitous.

The error in your reasoning is that you impose your own limited thinking on what the sovereignty of God would look like -- if you were God basically. You are unable to take into account all the other attributes of God, His love, goodness, kindness, mercy, longsuffering / patience etc. etc. etc. You more or less think of him as a human being rather than as the omnipotent omniscient Creator who is everywhere at once and "in whom we live and move and have our being." Yes, God IS all the causes in a sense. Everything we do is IN Him, OF Him, and yet we have motives of our own at the same time, even follow "laws" of our own.God CAN'T be arbitrary or whimsical. Everything He does follows law, in a sense He IS Law Himself. Some have said that. The moral law operates inexorably without a moment's ceasing because there is a sense in which it is God Himself.According to your view we should all FEEL like automatons if Calvin's understanding of God is correct. That's the problem with discussing Calvinism, at some point we all get tied up in knots trying to imagine ourselves as predetermined while at the same time we're perfectly aware that in our personal experience we could do whatever we feel like doing at any given moment. Get up from the computer and even I in my little apartment have dozens of options available to me.God is just a lot bigger and more complex than we can imagine.All Calvin is doing is emphasizing the few points in scripture that make it clear that nothing at all ever happens without God. He elaborates it and you get all offended about the idea but that's because you don't have a big enough idea of God.

Yes, of course, all that is thoroughly Biblical. God doesn't choose us because of anything in us that deserves being chosen. This is just another way of saying we are saved by grace through faith, not of our own works, and not because of anything in ourselves "lest any man should boast." He can make a Son of God out of anyone.That doesn't mean He doesn't have reasons for His choices, just not reasons we could ascribe to anything good in ourselves. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

For example:1 Cor 1:26-28 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:

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Even if God "hardened Pharoah's heart" Pharoah is acting according to his own character and motives, there is nothing artificial or unpredictable in his behavior.

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If hardening Pharoah's heart made no difference at all, then doing it must have been pure whim. Even mentioning it would be pretty pointless. And if God knew what Pharoah would decide without intervention, it must be that the "natural" decision would be to let the Israelites go.And that would never do. God would be without an excuse to show off his power, by inflicting another disaster on the Egyptian people.

I don't think any of that begins to address my point or my reasoning. And a number of the views you ascribe to me bear no resemblance to anything I have said or thought. And yet Calvin says that he does things "gratuitously", and "at his own mere pleasure". And I have explained why this must be true of Calvin's God.Perhaps we find that when God gives someone property A, he also gives them property B. But we cannot say that one of them was the reason for the other, that one was imposed on him and caused him to bestow the other. For he is the cause of both properties, and he might equally withhold properties A and B from that person and remain consistent with his rule. On what basis, then, can he decide which option to take? Well, you might say, perhaps he decides it on the basis of whether that person has property C. But He also disposes of property C, so this leaves us in the same situation. That is, having decided that qualities A, B and C will always go together, and properties not-A, not-B and not-C will always go together, he is still left with a choice of which of these two options to take, a choice which cannot be based on the presence or absence of properties A, B, or C, since that is exactly what he's deciding. And if you throw in property D, clearly he's still in the same sort of situation. He cannot base his decision on anything when he decides everything. We are left with Calvin's conclusion that all such choices God makes must be gratuitous, at his own mere pleasure.---It reminds me rather of a story I heard about economics in Stalin's Russia. Potatoes grown in the south of the country suffered from some sort of potato rot which meant that you couldn't keep on growing next year's potatoes from this year's potatoes over and over. There were two possible solutions. One was to ship potatoes from the north by train, the other was to grow them from seed in the south, in greenhouses. Which solution was better?Now, in our free economy a private company could figure out which is better, it's whichever cheaper. And if the government itself needed for some reason to get into the potato business, they could do just the same thing. But Stalin couldn't. Why not? Because he also set the price of transporting potatoes by rail, and the price of greenhouses. He not only got to choose the cheapest solution, he also got to choose which solution was cheaper.So how could he make a decision? The one thing we could predict is that, like Calvin's God, he would be consistent: he would either choose (a) to make freight cheaper and send the potatoes by rail or (b) to make greenhouses cheaper and grow them from seed. But because he set all the prices, he could have no rational basis for choosing which to do. His very omnipotence in economic matters rendered his economic decisions arbitrary and baseless.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But any reasons you ascribe would also be things that he chose. Which means that in the last analysis, we must say with Calvin that his God's actions are gratuitous, that they are "owing to the mere pleasure of God", that they have no cause but his will. Now, being Calvin, he particularly emphasized that one is not saved on account of one's works. But it hardly seems necessary to add that one is also not saved on account of one's shoe size or one's Social Security number. There is nothing left but an entirely gratuitous choice.

Bullshit Faith.You are just like Ilya, the Greek prostitute telling Oedipus. You claim that you read the Bible but you don't. Instead you just make shit up and twist what is actually written to fit your fantasies.Pharaoh is most certainly acting according to his own character and motives until the God character steps in and "hardens" his heart.The God character in the story is just trying to show who has the biggest dick.

I don't know if God's decisions are gratuitous or that's how they seem from our perspective since we don't know God's reasons for His decisions. I really don't have any interest in rereading Calvin's Institutes so I may be missing your point completely but then I'll just stop discussing this if that's the case.But also I don't see the problem with making all the decisions. Even Stalin must have been limited by some economic considerations in how he set prices, it couldn't have been purely arbitrary. He couldn't have controlled every single variable back to infinity. People have to be paid, it costs to use equipment etc.A person could certainly build a house making all the decisions for it assuming he had the knowledge of all the elements involved, and while the whole thing would be his own design, and some of the choices would be purely gratuitous, simply for the pleasure of having it that way, they would have to be supported by others structurally or cost-wise or whatever, nothing is ever purely gratuitous. Things have to fit together, they have to function, they have to follow laws of some sort.I just keep coming back to the fact that the world appears to make sense to us, it follows laws, it doesn't exhibit the strangeness that sheer gratuitous decisions on God's part should create. Physically things work together pretty predictably, and psychologically or morally we can usually make some sense out of even the oddest things that happen. Most anomalies in nature can usually be ascribed to some kind of error, something gone wrong rather than God's gratuitous choice. Your understanding of Calvin implies things out of place, out of character, strange. I don't see it.

But His will makes sense, it follows laws, it has reasons, it has order. It seems to me that you are wrongly assuming a whimsy in God's choices that would destroy all the order we see around us. But how "gratuitous" is it as you are using the word if he sought out "the foolish things of the world to confound the wise..." etc? That is, if we can see an actual reason for His choices? Yes, it all is according to His own desire and nothing else, but His desires have reasons and they work together with His other desires. One thing we believe is that we are living out a huge organized Plan of Redemption that is going to end rather spectacularly in an entirely new world in which all evildoers are punished and all the saved are without sin.Now maybe you don't mean to eliminate reasons by the term "gratuitous", but it sounds like you do, especially when you give the example of a little girl simply wanting to "liven up" her tea party by having one of her guests pour tea over another one. You are picturing a very whimsical, meaningless and disorderly world rather than the fairly orderly one we're used to ...which is coming apart at the seams lately, but that's another story... But we believe from the Bible that everything God does has a good outcome in mind. So we could say all his decisions are gratuitous in the sense that they serve His own idea of a good objective, but they aren't gratuitous in the sense that they serve no organized objective, as if "his pleasure" were something outside the orderliness we see in Creation.

I meant it made no difference in the sense of what actually happened, since it could have been said that he hardened his own heart, which I believe it does say in another passage, but in this case it said God hardened his heart, so that we will understand the sovereignty of God that is Calvin's particular concern to elucidate.One way or the other Pharoah's heart was hardened, which is why the story plays out as it does. We are simply given the privilege of seeing that God operates in all the affairs of humanity. That's a misunderstanding. If NOTHING happens without God's intervention, which is the point of mentioning it, then EVERYTHING that happens is the "natural" effect. Again, we are simply being given the privilege of seeing God working in the ordinary affairs of life. There is no opposition as you are picturing it in other words. God is not doing something to overcome Pharoah's own inclinations. Either way Pharoah's heart was hardened. BOTH are true, really: he hardened his own heart and God hardened it. That's the picture of reality I think we are supposed to take from such a revelation. The connection between God and His Creation is that intimate is the point. I can't raise my hand without God's raising it. The point of the plagues WAS to demonstrate His power, to show that He is the Creator God, as against all the idol demon gods worshiped in Egypt, which as I've understood it are symbolized by each of the plagues, though I'd have to review all that to be sure. The frog was one of their deities for instance, so God showed that He has control over their gods by bringing a plague of frogs. That IS the point of the Biblical revelation, after all, God showing Himself in the affairs of humanity so we'll know He exists and has the power to do what He promises. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The Bible is God's revelation of Himself as part of His plan of redemption, which is to overcome the effects of the Fall. One of those effects was that we "died" to God, lost our spiritual connection to Him and completely forgot Him, and all the nations of the world chose demon gods to rule over them, because those were accessible whereas the Creator God no longer was since Adam and Eve disobeyed and lost contact with Him. So the Bible was given in order to teach us about the God we'd lost contact with. In the Exodus account of the plagues God is teaching us and the Israelites and the Egyptians that He has power over all the idol gods on earth, that they have no real power but He does, so that we might learn to trust Him instead of all our idols.