I sent this to a guy named Andrew who goes by the monicker of "Reformed Ninja." I caught a glimpse of an article he wrote for his blog about how God's sovereignty and man's free will are mutually exclusive. The logic was, to say the least.... a bit simplistic. I dropped him the following reply:
Dear Reformed Ninja, in response to your post,
“How is it possible to say that God is sovereign and yet we have free will to choose Him?”
God being sovereign is free to let us make a decision.
“Saying that man has the free will to choose God is by itself opposite of the definition of the sovereignty of God.”
Why is that? Complete power does not necessitate complete micro-management. That is badly over-simplified logic.
“The Arminian belief obviously takes God out of the center of salvation and puts man in the center of the salvation process, which completely contradicts the Bible…”
Untrue, for if God does not draw a man to Christ, then he cannot be saved. The only man at the center there is Christ.
“If God was not in control of salvation, and man was, then it is completely possible and fair to say that at the death of Christ no one may have ever come to salvation in Christ.”
That supposition is invalid, for God knew that many would believe in Christ. Also, no one is really arguing that God isn’t sovereign in salvation or doesn’t choose us, simply that He allows us to accept or reject Him.
“If God did not choose us, then there is the possibility that no one would have ever come to faith in Christ and the death of Christ would have been in vain…..Did God just get lucky that some people have chosen Him? Is He wiping the sweat off His forehead and saying, “Whew! I’m glad that worked out!”?”
“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” (Romans 8:29)
I’m going with ‘No’ to that quesion. God does choose, but His foreknowledge plays into it as well. Just to point out, you aren’t addressing the issue of the all-knowing God being weak or non-sovereign at all, you’re just making very wild conjectures under the assumption that if Arminianism/Synergism is true, then God could not have known for sure that anyone would believe in Christ.
“Imagine this. You are falling off of a skyscraper. On your way down you see a flagpole sticking out of the side of the building. It’s not reaching out to you. It’s just there. You decide to grab it and you are saved. That flagpole was not in control of your salvation; you were.”
As opposed to Calvinism where you’re simply impaled on it. Arguments by analogy are cute, but prove nothing. It is true that salvation is contingent on men believing in Christ, yet it is also contingent with God choosing and drawing the sinner, this is why it is called ‘Synergism.’
“Arminians, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. God is not sovereign in your beliefs. It is contradictory to believe so.”
Again, you’ve not established why God is not allowed to let us have a limited free will. Why exactly is that contradictory? Are you saying that God cannot delegate to us free moral agency? Your strikes lack no vigor young ninja, but they are missing their mark entirely. Since you seem to believe that Synergism “completely contradicts the Bible,” then there’s something I pose to you: The Challenge to Reformed Theology by Scriptural Fact. I invite you to respond to it if you wish.
He read it over and responded,
"Much like water flowing through a hose, it must flow through the entirety of the hose to come out the other end, not just a portion of it; so if at the beginning, end, or anywhere in-between it runs into a 'kink,' the water flow stops entirely."
Why can you use analogies and I can't? I will copy and paste your very own words from my blog reformedninja.wordpress.com ...
"Arguments by analogy are cute, but prove nothing."
I appreciate your response, but let's play fair here.
Well, that was the most abbreviated response I've yet witnessed. I sent back to him,
Hey Andrew,
...I wasn't knocking the use of analogies in general (Christ used them as well), but arguments based strictly in analogy. My use of analogy was buffered by fairly well evident and logical principles, e.g. "Likewise, a hypothesis must mesh with all of the facts from beginning to end, else it be relegated to the massive heap of victims already claimed by the process of elimination," which the analogy only served to further elucidate. The argument had already been made and well-established, the analogy was an illustration of, not the substance of the argument (indeed an analogy, but not an argument by analogy).
Your use of analogy includes no accompanying evidence to support the incorrect conclusions you draw from it, apart from your arbitrary assumption that God couldn't know if anyone was saved if man has any choice; which makes little sense at all, since the weakness of a "God knows who will choose Him" was what you were setting out to prove in the first place.
Additionally, you also make an 'apples and oranges' comparison, showing the Calvinist as believing in an active God in salvation and the Arminian a passive impersonal object; the primary difference between Arminianism and Semipelagianism is the concept that God is the initiator of salvation, not man, hence the analogy is also wildly inaccurate.
Pretty short exchange that never got around to actually addressing the issue. The Challenge to our esteemed Owenian Oniwaban of course still stands open for him to address whenever he's ready for Taiketsu with the Synergist Samurai.
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