Calvinism is back

[Ash]

Welcome to the austere – and increasingly embraced – message of Calvinism. Five centuries ago, John Calvin's teachings reconceived Christianity; midwifed Western ideas about capitalism, democracy, and religious liberty; and nursed the Puritan values that later cast the character of America.

Today, his theology is making a surprising comeback, challenging the me-centered prosperity gospel of much of modern evangelicalism with a God-first immersion in Scripture. In an age of materialism and made-to-order religion, Calvinism's unmalleable doctrines and view of God as an all-powerful potentate who decides everything is winning over many Christians – especially the young.

Twenty-something followers in the Presbyterian, Anglican, and independent evangelical churches are rallying around Calvinist, or Reformed, teaching. In the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant body, at least 10 percent of its pastors identify as Calvinist, while more than one-third of recent seminary graduates do.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society...vinism-is-back

[Kodos]

If you postulate god's omnipotence and omniprescience predestination logically follows, it cannot be otherwise...

Im not speaking as a christian rather from simple logic.

[mladikov]

Originally Posted by Kodos

If you postulate god's omnipotence and omniprescience predestination logically follows, it cannot be otherwise...

Im not speaking as a christian rather from simple logic.

There's predestination, and then there's predestination. The first is a consequence of God's authority over time, the latter is Calvinism's deterministic resolution of the soteriological difficulties presented by that consequence. You can certainly believe in predestination (i.e., that God has ordained our afterlives) without adopting it as an unconditional election.

[Kodos]

You can certainly believe in predestination (i.e., that God has ordained our afterlives) without adopting it as an unconditional election.

That question is academic... it was still determined before/outside of time whether you were to be saved or damned.

[Graves]

Originally Posted by Kodos

If you postulate god's omnipotence and omniprescience predestination logically follows, it cannot be otherwise...

Im not speaking as a christian rather from simple logic.

What Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston refers to as "the Greek goddess of Necessity".

[mladikov]

Originally Posted by Kodos

That question is academic... it was still determined before/outside of time whether you were to be saved or damned.

It's not strictly 'academic' -- conditional predestination was accepted by the majority of early Christians and theologians. See this article, which describes the views of the Church Fathers on predestination.

[Basil Fawlty]

Originally Posted by mladikov

It's not strictly 'academic' -- conditional predestination was accepted by the majority of early Christians and theologians. See this article, which describes the views of the Church Fathers on predestination.

Thanks for the link, the passage below confirms a hunch I've had for sometime now concerning a kinship between Calvinism and Gnosticism.
Chadwick:

Indeed reading Henry Chadwick's THE EARLY CHURCH (page 38) the index points the first idea of unconditional predestination as appearing from the gnostic sect, not an orthodox body of believers:

...the Gnostics [placed]...the natural order at so vast a distance in moral value from the supreme God. The influence of fatalistic ideas drawn from popular astrology and magic became fused with notions derived from Pauline language about predestination to produce a rigidly deterministic scheme. Redemption was from destiny, not from the consequences of responsible action, and was granted to a pre-determined elect in whom alone was the divine spark.

[Petr]

Predestination can be found already in the Old Testament - after all, fatalism is hardly alien to Semitic cultures.

Psalms 139:1-6, 15-16

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. You hem me in--behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
...

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

[Petr]

Originally Posted by mladikov

It's not strictly 'academic' -- conditional predestination was accepted by the majority of early Christians and theologians. See this article, which describes the views of the Church Fathers on predestination.

Btw mladikov, are you aware that you are citing a fundie-Protestant, apocalyptic source there?

http://www.jarom.net/contents-proph.php

These sort of quirky Prods love conspiracies, so naturally he would like to see some Gnostic conspiracy behind Augustine's predestinarianism as well.


Petr

[Basil Fawlty]

Originally Posted by Petr

Btw mladikov, are you aware that you are citing a fundie-Protestant, apocalyptic source there?

http://www.jarom.net/contents-proph.php

These sort of quirky Prods love conspiracies, so naturally he would like to see some Gnostic conspiracy behind Augustine's predestinarianism as well.


Petr

Henry Chadwick is not a fundie, nor are the Church Fathers who are quoted extensively in support of the thesis that unconditional predestination is an Augustinian innovation.