Let’s talk about this Calvinist idea of predestination. Basically, that God pulls every string, deciding who’s in and who’s out, with free will just a side note because God’s Sovereignty demands it. Sounds tidy, right? But the Bible keeps pushing back, shouting from the rooftops that we’ve got real choices to make. It’s not some robotic rerun; it’s a dynamic story where God hands us the reins and says, “Your move.”
God repeatedly tells individuals to make choices, implying free will. In Joshua 24:15, Joshua exhorts the Israelites, “Choose this day whom you will serve,” presenting a clear decision between serving God or idols. This command assumes the ability to choose freely, not a predetermined outcome. Similarly, Deuteronomy 30:19 declares, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life.” The imperative to “choose” underscores human responsibility to respond to God’s call, incompatible with a view where every decision is divinely dictated.
In the New Testament, Jesus’ invitations affirm free will. Matthew 11:28 says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” This open invite requires a voluntary response, suggesting individuals can accept or reject it. Likewise, John 7:17 states, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” Jesus emphasizes choice as central to faith, countering the idea that God irresistibly determines belief.
Calvinists often cite Romans 9:16-18, which highlights God’s sovereignty in showing mercy, to support predestination. However, Paul’s broader argument in Romans emphasizes human responsibility. Romans 10:9 declares, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart… you will be saved.” (Paul will continue on in the text pointing to baptism & faith). The conditional “if” implies that salvation hinges on personal choice, not divine coercion. Furthermore, 2 Peter 3:9 reveals God’s desire that “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,” suggesting universal opportunity for salvation through free response, not selective predetermination.
Ephesians 1:4-5, another Calvinist cornerstone, states God chose believers “before the foundation of the world.” Yet, this should be understood corporately; God predestining the church as a body for salvation, while individuals freely choose to obey the Gospel and are added to the church through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9; Acts 2:38,41,47). This harmonizes with passages like Revelation 3:20, where Jesus says, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in.” The imagery of opening the door underscores human agency in responding to divine initiative.
Moreover, Calvinism’s strict determinism raises concerns about God’s character. If God ordains all actions, including sin, it conflicts with James 1:13, which states, “God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.” Free will allows humans to bear responsibility for sin, preserving God’s holiness and justice. Neither the devil nor God made us do it. Scripture consistently portrays God as inviting, not compelling, human response. Scripture paints God as the ultimate pursuer, not puppet-master. Free will aligns with a God who desires genuine relationship over robotic obedience.
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Borger church of Christ @ Franklin & Juniper 
And increase the probability that somebody in the conversation will commit the sin of word-wrangling (2nd Tim. 2:14)? I find nothing in the bible warranting Christians to encourage unbelievers to sin. You will say the Calvinist debate is not the kind of “word-wrangling” Paul talked about, but in the last 500 years, the Calvinist debate consists almost exclusively of disputes between Christians about how to correctly define key biblical concepts, such as predestination, atonement, grace, freewill, sovereignty, etc.
Calvinists would object that this is no “side-note”, but that mankind is given compatibalist freewill. But the Calvinist effort to pretend this is enough to justify holding people accountable is a joke.
If you knew an unbeliever was being evangelized by a Calvinist, would you advise the unbeliever to ignore that message?
After all, it is precisely a person’s openness to hearing the Calvinist gospel, that explains how the vast majority of Calvinists became Calvinists. I can’t think of a better way to to reduce the numbers of Calvinists, than to put a stop to the method that has proven in the last 500 years to be the most popular reason a person becomes a Calvinist.
I see nothing wrong in accusing the author of James of contradicting parts of the OT. If bible inerrancy really isn’t the looming idol that Christian fanatics have turned it into, then my siding with a position against bible inerrancy cannot rightly be characterized as some blasphemous shocking bit of sin or ignorance. Jesus never expressed or implied that anybody was obligated to defend the original bible manuscripts from charges of error…yet most conservative Christians today act as if “answering skeptics” is priority number 1. Paul came along and made Christianity far more intolerably complex than the Jesus of the 4 canonical gospel could ever plausibly have intended it to be.
That’s right, I say the accounts in Acts about Paul experiencing Christ on the road to Damascus are pure fiction, Paul was no more a true apostle than Ignatius or Marcian were. If you are shocked at the thought that Paul and his supporter Luke would lie to people about his god-experience merely to gain more converts, read 1st Cor. 9:20-21. No Christian in the last 30 years has been able to coherently describe how Paul could pass himself off to Jews as if he believed himself under the law, while in fact thinking himself free from the law…and do all this without giving them a false impression of his true theological convictions. That’s because what Paul plainly indicates a willingness to engage in the “honorable lie”. But lying is lying, regardless of how it is dressed up.
One of the more powerful arguments for open-theism (god is imperfect) is the very act of god’s creating mankind, since it was precisely this act that god later “regretted”. Genesis 6:5-7. I don’t care at all how modern-day inerrantists attempt to “reconcile” this with later parts of the bible that ascribe unmitigated wisdom to god (i.e., they are certain that the Genesis passage is mere phenomenological language)…I only care about the legitimate hermeneutic that asks how the originally intended audience would likely have understood the passage. Since the originally intended audience for Genesis 6:5-7 were not systematic theologians, but more likely Iron-Age goat-herders, there is every reason to think such simpleton illiterates would interpret it literally, each time they were made aware of it by the town crier or priest, who would have to read it aloud to them since they couldn’t read the text themselves.
God can hardly do “justice” if he “regrets” creating the mankind that was supposed to give him a reason to go around “displaying” his justice.
Since bible inerrancy is rejected by most Christian scholars, that alone is sufficient to justify my rejecting it from my hermeneutical concerns, and remain open to the possibility that the classic proof-texts used by open-theists really truly and genuinely do contradict the expressions of a later evolved Judaism about god being maximally omni-max.
And the specter of an ever-present tendency among ancient Semitics to employ hyperbole is another justification for refusing to interpret literally those passages that talk ascribe infinite wisdom to god, the way ancient pagans extolled their kings with embellished flattery. This tendency to exaggerate is utilized by Christian apologists to answer the divine-genocide problem in the OT. See Copan, Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Baker, 2014). So the presumption of the ancient biblical authors’ tendency to exaggerate is in perfect accord with that conservative Christian scholars say was true about the ancient Semitic literary style.
This unacceptable generalization therefore functions to disagree with bible passages where the devil is making somebody do something (Mark 5:4) and where God forces people to sin (Ezekiel 38:4 ff).
If scripture is so plain as you say, you make a good argument that the dedicated Calvinist is at best a false Christian. How else can you possibly explain that an professing follower of Christ can read in the bible the stuff that you think is very plain and clear, and consistently misinterpret it for decades? You would be a Calvinist yourself if you trifled that maybe it was for higher mysterious reasons that god wanted that Christian to remain in heretical mud for so long.
From the unbeliever perspective, I would say this hardly matters, since at best all it does is show what god wanted back in biblical days. You commit a demonstrably fallacious leap of logic when you infer that whatever god wanted for 1st century people, necessarily doubles as his will for 21st century people. I’m not saying your view is wrong. I’m saying your view incapable of reasonable demonstration. Notice how failure of demonstration gives me legitimate excuse. The following are incapable of demonstration: bigfoot, space aliens, the Bermuda triangle being a gateway to another dimension, KJV Onlyism, the prosperity gospel…and any notion that god expects of me in the 21st century, anything he expected of 1st century people.