Is Calvinism a form of Gnostic Christianity?

Evil events happen, and God Himself says in Isaiah 45 that He creates both good and evil in the sense of calamities. Read Amos 3 something too which says "if there is calamity in a city, will not God have done it?"The twin towers attack was absolutely God's judgment,. You are absolutely totally wrong about judgment. Jesus came to save and not judge INDIVIDUALS, but nations still come under judgment and this is well known. Even Lincoln knew it as I recently posted here but it is mentioned all through history with relation to various events.And THINK about the implications of God's foreseeing our salvation instead of ordaining it. If we CHOOSE salvation on our own that's a work which allows us to "boast" which ought to be obvious. Our ability to choose is also given by God.That's another one, Total Depravity means we do not have the ability to choose salvation.I'm sticking with Limited Atonement although I understand your argument. His death was sufficient for all even though only efficacious for the elect. That's OK too.I'll have to come back to answer any I've missed.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No it wasn't.Now what?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

But I have --- repeatedly --- allowed that Calvin's God may work to self-consistent rules. But as I have demonstrated, this still leaves him with arbitrary choices. But the little girl is like Calvin's God. Just like Calvin's God. She causes Teddy to be naughty, then she punishes him for it. She doesn't make Teddy be naughty and then reward him with extra cake. She makes him be naughty and punishes him. And when she makes him hurt Barbie, she makes Barbie protest and say ouch, that hurts, rather than saying tra-la-la, that was fun. Again, her game is perfectly self-consistent. Self-consistent, like the actions of Calvin's God. Her desires, as you say, "work together" --- like Calvin's God. And yet, like Calvin's God, her actions are "gratuitous", they are at her "mere pleasure" and have no cause outside of her will. Because she could instead have made Teddy say "How nice you look in that dress, Barbie! Would you like another scone?" and made things play out consistently with that.--- Now I come to think of it, if you're a Calvinist don't you have to think that God directed the tea party? God is playing with Teddy and Barbie, and he decided to liven up the party with Teddy's misbehavior. Not only is he like the little girl, but the little girl is not like the little girl. She's like one of the dolls.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You gave the tea party story in the first place to illustrate God through the little girl, picturing God as having a whimsical desire just to "liven up the party," to which I kept objecting in various ways. Now that you continue to insist, my objection is this: God would have a good motive for Teddy's behavior, not Teddy's motive but His own motive. He would have a plan, which in the normal course of things we can never know about, but scripture tells us this occasionally, such as when Joseph tells his brothers after they're all together in Egypt that what they had meant for evil in selling him to the caravan God had meant for good. The good is now being realized in their coming to Egypt during the famine in their own country, so they can now have food as well as be reunited with their brother who has a powerful position in Egypt, Jacob is reunited with his favorite son he'd thought was dead and so on.Scripture tells us that "all things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to His purpose."The Fall also had an ultimate good purpose although I don't think it's been fully revealed yet. The end result of the Plan of Redemption will be a New Creation that is much better than the first.In your story all the little girl wants to do is "liven up her tea party." That's what keeps it from working as an apt analogy to how God works.Yes, you'll complain that the ultimate result isn't going to be good for everybody and you're probably right about that. But there's still time to repent and become one of those who get to appreciate the better world.As scripture also says, Shall the clay complain about the potter who forms it for his own purposes?We'd all like to see everybody saved and happy, I know I would, but that would mean everybody coming to love and obey God. Doesn't seem very likely from here. But I also know that God is good and even if I can't see the end from the beginning as He does, I know it will be the best possible outcome. This isn't just according to Calvinism, the Arminians also know that people go to Hell.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

It makes no sense to think he'd contradict himself in the same sentence, HBD. You are misreading this. The key is here: He is emphasizing that the creation was good and yet man sinned, so he locates the source of the sin in man. We aren't to think it comes from the creation, that's stated very clearly, so somehow man had the ability within himself to sin. It was "by his own evil intention" that man sinned. "Accordingly" he says, "Accordingly, we should contemplate the evident cause of condemnation in the corrupt nature of humanity..."I know it sounds odd. Man was part of creation and yet he's insistent that creation is not the cause of the sin, therefore somehow it is the corrupt nature of man that is the cause. It's not contradictory although we might wonder where this corrupt nature could have come from since creation was good.I've got to do this piecemeal, sorry. Just a concept at a time.

Well let's look at it. Where did the "evil intention" come from ? We can't put it down to a corrupt human nature because it supposedly caused the corruption. And it would be very odd for a human with an uncorrupted and "very good" nature to have such an evil intent.Then we have the implausibility of this evil intent corrupting human nature for all time. Surely a "very good" human nature should be more resistant to corruption.And then we have the whole "Sovereignty of God" issue which says that God must have willed both the evil intent and its effects.So, on considering these points it looks to me as if Calvin is implicitly - and grudgingly - accepting an Arminian view, but trying to gloss over the fact by saying that we shouldn't think about it.

How is the twin towers attack a judgement of the nation? I know the nation is shovelling its freedom out the window in favour of false security but that seems more like their own stupidity than God's judgement.

Well, one of God's judgments of a nation is incompetent leaders. See Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 9. To be attacked on your own land is another of God's judgments on a nation. I say the twin towers destruction was a warning, all-out judgment would be more like the destruction of Dresden.This is all extrapolated from God's warnings to Israel, on whom His judgments would have been particularly harsh because they were under covenant with Him as the US isn't, but nevertheless those laws serve as a model to all nations of how God works, how He judges disobedience of His Law. The Law was explicitly given to Israel, it is "written on the hearts" of humanity at large.

I more or less agree. That was of course my original intention in using that quote, to show how it mitigates some of Calvin's other statements.But he is very clear that he has some idea that human nature was capable of this corruption while the creation at large was not. He doesn't explain it, at least not here. Elsewhere, as Dr. A quotes him, he does attribute it all to God's sovereign will. Perhaps he tries to reconcile all this somewhere else, but I'm not up to studying the Institutes again right now.I had been considering the possibility that there was something in the nature of the act of creation itself that brought about the Fall, as setting up the possibility of opposition to the Creator God in its simply being separate from Him; but Calvin is clearly debunking that idea, and his reasoning seems correct on that score.

George W. Bush.But he was democratically elected, after all, so maybe you're talking about a longer-term judgement - the Republican neo-conservatives. So when you said it was "absolutely" a judgement, you were using the word "absolutely" in a typically loose way.

No, even a warning is God's judgment, it's just a way of saying it's not as bad as it could have been. And as a warning it presages more to come.I don't think we've had competent leadership since the eighteenth century myself. Exaggerating but not by much. OK I'll take that back but it's been a long time. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't mind getting off with a warning.

In the 18th century you probably would not have survived long.

As has been pointed out elsewhere the strong view of the Sovereignty of God taken by Calvin gives God primary responsibility for all the actions that supposedly are being judged. Even if the humans responsible have been corrupted and act from that corruption that, too was arranged by God - in part so that those actions would occur.My interpretation then is that Calvin is saying that we should not think about that. And it's obvious why it is a problem. If God is the prime mover, the master manipulator behind the sins being judged, then God is at least as guilty as anyone else participating. This is a point that deserves more than "don't think about it", and I consider it quite telling that Calvin should resort to that.

He's just saying we can't attribute it to the creation, I don't see that he said not to think about it.But this is one of the many ways the Calvinism discussion becomes tedious and tiresome. I'm convinced enough that if God isn't sovereign over all things then He gets depicted as weak, and I've had personal experience of the effects of that in Arminian churches. I'm also convinced that God is good and cannot commit sin in any way so that the way He is sovereign is not THAT way. I'm really not into trying to sort all this out beyond that much. Arminianism is simply not an option.