Twistie
Loyal
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2022
- Messages
- 3,042
What is the point your trying to be a right about??? Is it you think Abba favors one over another?"KingJ,
Your response is the ultimate white flag in this debate. You have spent more than half of your post complaining about 'AI,' 'loaded prompts,' and 'circular reasoning' because you are completely terrified of the direct, textual questions I have laid before you. You have not answered a single one.
Instead, you have doubled down on your shocking statements, openly admitted to Pelagianism, and attempted to separate the cross from the final judicial verdict. Let the unyielding text of Scripture completely flatten your defense:
1. The Blasphemous Escape Hatch: "Escaping Condemnation" Without Christ
In your panic to defend your previous heresy, you have actually made it worse. You write: 'I did not say man can save himself from sin... I said man can respond to God's call and thereby escape condemnation.'
This is a theological catastrophe. You have just claimed that an unregenerate sinner can escape judicial condemnation by their own autonomous power before Christ saves them from sin.
Look at the text of Romans 8:1: 'There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.'
Scripture knows absolutely nothing of a category of people who 'escape condemnation' by their own free-will response while still waiting for Jesus to deal with their sin. Condemnation is the legal penalty for sin. If a man can escape condemnation by his own response, then he has legally justified himself before the court of heaven. You have completely bypassed the blood of Christ and made man his own legal savior.
2. The Direct Textual Proof for Justification Before Faith
You repeatedly scream for a direct passage that teaches justification before faith, claiming I am only using 'deductions.' Let's look at the absolute, unyielding grammar of Romans 5:9-10:
Look at the text, KingJ. Paul explicitly parallels 'justified by his blood' in verse 9 with 'reconciled to God by the death of his Son' in verse 10. They are the exact same legal reality.
- Verse 9: 'Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.'
- Verse 10: 'For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son...'
The verb is katēllagēmen ('we were reconciled')—an Aorist Indicative Passive. The passive voice means we received the verdict; the aorist tense means it is a past, completed, punctuated historical fact. Paul anchors this completed legal verdict to 'the death of his Son'—which happened in 33 AD. And he explicitly states this happened 'while we were enemies.'
An unregenerate enemy is not a believer. Therefore, Paul explicitly states that the individual elect were legally reconciled and justified at the cross 2,000 years before they ever possessed faith. If justification only happens at the moment of faith, you are calling Paul a liar. You are forcing a past-tense historical action in 33 AD to wait for a 21st-century human choice to become real.
3. You Confess the Core of the Pelagian Heresy
You write: 'Being a sinner does not mean that a person is incapable of repenting or responding to God's call... Your theology makes that genuine response impossible...'
You have openly confessed the Pelagian heresy. You are claiming that a natural, unregenerate sinner has the inherent, independent spiritual capability to love, obey, and respond to God.
Let the word of God flatline your view of human capability:
Scripture states the natural man cannot submit, cannot know spiritual things, and cannot come. They are vitally dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). By claiming they are fully capable of responding on their own, you are denying the total depravity of the Fall. You are forcing God to give faith based on a superior capability hidden inside the sinner's heart.
- Romans 8:7: 'Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.'
- 1 Corinthians 2:14: 'But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God... neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.'
- John 6:44: 'No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him...'
4. The Accusation That Makes You the Judge of the Potter
You explicitly write that if God only regenerates the elect, it implies 'pure partiality by God. That if true makes Him a monster.'
This is the exact, carnal arrogance that Paul anticipated and crushed 2,000 years ago. When the objector in Romans 9:19 makes the exact same complaint you are making ('Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?'), look at how Paul answers. He doesn't apologize or say 'Oh, God gives everyone an equal free-will chance!'
Paul rebukes your very mindset:
You call God a 'monster' if He discriminates in mercy. But God is a holy Judge. Every single human being deserves hell. If God leaves a sinner in their rebellion and sends them to hell, He is acting in strict, impartial justice. If He sovereignly chooses to quicken a vessel of mercy, He is acting in unconditional grace. God does not owe salvation to a single rebel. Your quarrel is not with Calvinism; your quarrel is with the Potter of Romans 9.
The Bottom Line
You can continue to cry about 'AI' to distract the readers, but you cannot escape the devastating question you have run away from for five rounds: Who made you to differ? (1 Corinthians 4:7).
If God provides the exact same drawing, the exact same grace, and the exact same call to both the saved man and the damned man, and the saved man is in heaven because he chose to respond while the other didn't, then the ultimate, decisive pivot point of salvation is man's choice, man's capability, and man's heart.
Your system allows the creature to boast in the courtroom of heaven: 'Christ made it possible, but I am here because I used my free will better than the guy in hell.' My theology leaves the glory entirely with the Lamb who successfully, legally, and completely redeemed His peculiar people from all iniquity (Titus 2:14) while they were still helpless enemies. Answer the text, KingJ, and stop hiding behind a smoke screen."
Thanks!