You made an issue of it because you brought it up.. .if it was not an issue you would not have brought it up… shhhesh… now you are having more issue with it as we pointed out you had no issue with it in the past when your “friends” referred to you as “Rev” until that post and you had issue with it…

(anyone else’s head spinning over the spin of Ken the not so revered former reverend/teacher/pastor?)

Be Blessed,
iggy

Just because I point out I don’t use the title of “Rev” does not mean I was rebuking Dan. I simply said: “You might notice I don’t the title Reverend.” Maybe you ought not try and read into what you think it “seems” I mean. The truth is you’re really not very good at it.

And this is hardly making an “issue” out of it. Man, it was a mere statement of fact. You can do better than to attack me on what is obviously a non-issue, can’t you?

Here is a quote on how much this is a “non-issue” to you…

1) “Rev. Ken Silva calls on Rick Warren to boycott Zondervan.” You might notice I don’t use the title “Reverend.”

It seemed it was # 1 on your list… of “non-issues”.

I think that this is once again a case of redirection and trying to get out of saying sorry…

Blessings,
iggy

Friend, it’s a non-issue to me.

In fact this was used very often of/by you without comment in the past…

http://www.emergentno.com/author/rev-ken-silva/

So, I think you need to let your friends who revere you so to take notice not to revere you any more.

In other words dearest Ken, I think it appears that you were in fact trying to divert the subject and change it to something not even mentioned in the post.

Blessings,
iggy

No, he wasn’t. Ingrid had that as my user name, I had nothing to do with that.

If you read our previous posts dealing with this topic, I think it is evident that the ‘fruit’ (orthopraxy, behavior) that is the logical endpoint of election is truly ‘bad fruit’ – which renders prayer, missions and evangelism irrelevant, at best. There is no good orthopraxy that accompanies fatalism/determinism that comes with the Calvinist view of election.

You asked ‘either God is the one who ultimately determines whether someone is heavenbound, or man does’. While I can only speak for myself, I don’t know that the other writers here would disagree with me. Please forgive me for not citing chapter and verse with the following, though given time, I could:

1) God is sovereign.
2) He gives each person permission to choose to accept His gift of grace and to follow Him, or not.
3) If that person exercises that choice given by God to accept His grace, then God will save them. If that person rejects God’s grace, then God will not save them.

SO – did God determine this or did man? Well, if God had not given man the choice (which became available through Christ’s sacrifice) in the first place, then man would be doomed. However, since God did give man that choice, it is his decision with that choice which is deterministic.

So, God first gave man the choice, so He would be the ultimate determining power. However, since He allowed man to make the choice, once that choice was given, man had the determining power at that point.

You wrote:

You can claim that there is something in the middle if you want, but you won’t find much support from church history.

Actually, I would, since there are a number of figures in church history who have fallen somewhere in the middle – including those in the history of the 19th century ‘Great Awakening’ and the Reformation movement. We have historically rejected systematic theology as man’s attempt to put God in a box. When we create ’systems’ that He has to fit into , it ultimately leads to poor ‘fruit’ via poor orthopraxy – whether it be Calvinist or Arminian or something entirely different…

You missed my main emphasis, which was not about the matter of ‘intelligence’ (as you mentioned above), but over the flawed thesis of this post, as seen even in the title “the Fruit of Their Theology”. In other words:

Fruit = bad behavior

Their Theology = some election-based belief relating to Calvinism.

That is simply wrong to make that kind of correlation, and as I pointed out – there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Likewise, I demonstrated that Ken is not even a Calvinist to begin with.

As far as being in “neither” camp, perhaps you don’t share all of the dogmas of either one, but make no mistake – either God is the one who ultimately determines whether someone is heavenbound, or man does. If you drill down deep enough, one of those two realities is true and the other is false. You can claim that there is something in the middle if you want, but you won’t find much support from church history. This has always been a polarized issue, and the real goofiness would be in going against the greatest scholars in church history (from both camps) by essentially saying “all of you are wrong and I am right”. It’s possible that you *are* right and they are wrong, but it’s not very likely.

Thanks for posting my comment.

Thank you, as well, for pointing out that Ken was using the ‘Rev’ moniker months ago, while he has recently decided to deflect criticism by complaining about someone else using the same title for him…

If you peruse a number of the posts, you’ll see that most of the writers here (from multiple viewpoints of these issues) see themselves as neither Calvinist nor Arminian. Intelligence has nothing to do with acceptance/non-acceptance of belief. Both viewpoints have strong points and weak ones (particular when examined at their logical extremes) and are flawed because they are human-derived ’systems’ to explain how God works (i.e. systematic theologies). Most of us embrace that God is sovereign and omniscient AND that He gave men free will (a seeming contradiction to some). Additionally, I tend to view it from a scientific frame, as well, via string/dimensional theory which gives credence to our inability to understand the nature of God (because His very existence is beyond our 3.5-dimensional existence) and how both God can ‘foreknow’ and man can have the ability to choose without a conflict between one and the other.

Both Calvinism and Arminianism ARE ‘goofy’ when taken to their logical conclusions, and both have to perform mental gymnastics to esacpe their ‘goofyness’. This is in the same way that Newtonian physics is ‘goofy’ when viewed in macro- and micro-scale.