[Vision2020] Christ Church and freedom of religion

[Taro Tanaka]

ACS writes: [[ Christ Church subscribes to the most inflexible sort of 
Calvinism: they believe that no human effort whatsoever can cause a person 
to be saved. They also believe, quite strictly, in predestination. ]]

PS corrects: CC believes that no human effort whatsoever can cause a person 
to be saved APART FROM THE GRACE OF GOD. CC also believes that human agency 
is required. Saul of Tarsus was saved directly through a confrontation with 
Jesus. That is the only example which comes to mind of a person being saved 
apart from human agency. Even there, however, it should be remembered that 
Jesus is a human being, so even that case is not truly an exception. Even if 
someone gets saved by reading a Bible that they found in their hotel room, 
somebody printed those Bibles and placed them in that hotel room. So people 
are not saved apart from human effort. However, all the human effort in the 
world will be for naught if the Holy Spirit does not work in a person's 
heart to give them the ability to believe.

ACS writes: [[ They do not believe in any sort of free will whatsoever. ]]

PS corrects: Actually, only what you label Calvinism (but which is more 
properly labeled a biblical worldview) is able to account for free will. It 
is in fact people who believe in a purely mechanical universe (i.e., 
Darwinian evolutionists) who cannot account for free will. From that 
perspective, the universe and all that it contains are reduced to the 
products of pure random chance: what we deceive ourselves into believing to 
be free-will decisions are in fact explainable entirely as the result of 
biochemical reactions which themselves are taking place as the result of a 
long, vast series of random chance occurrences. Anything which ultimately 
derives from pure random chance is ultimately meaningless: after all, it is 
the result of pure random chance. In other words, according to this 
perspective, everything is mechanically determined and ultimately derived 
from pure random chance. "Free will" becomes quite impossible in such a 
mechanically deterministic universe.

The biblical perspective recognizes that there is no genuine contradiction 
between God's sovereign predestination and man's free will. God is a God who 
knows all possible contingencies. From our human perspective, the number of 
actors and actions throughout history might as well be infinite, although 
they are not infinite, strictly speaking. If we throw in the additional 
dimension of complexity of all the alternate scenarios that could, logically 
speaking, have been possible, then everything becomes "infinitely" more 
complex still. Only an omnisicent God could know all the alternate 
possibilities, and in fact, He does. Yet out of all those scenarios, only 
one scenario has occurred. Furthermore, we confess (because the Bible tells 
us so) that history is not being pushed from behind so much as pulled 
inexorably toward a predetermined conclusion. Yet within this framework, 
there is still free will for man, at least to the extent that God can justly 
hold each of us fully responsible for our decisions. If you want to insist 
that the biblical worldview, which recognizes God's sovereign providence and 
predestination over all things, makes free will impossible to maintain, I 
remind you that the contrary perspective, which replaces God with 
mechanistic determinism and random chance, does not give one free will 
either: your decisions are the results of your hormones, which are a cosmic 
accident.

ACS writes: [[ What the Church can compel people to do is behave in an 
outward manner
that conforms with Christian. ]]

PS corrects: The only method of compulsion that the Church has is the threat 
of excommunication. And the Church has exactly ZERO power to compel people 
outside the Church to do anything.

-- Princess Sushitushi

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