We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
A Calvinist and an Arminian walk into a bar…
Roger Olson posted A Conversation between a Calvinist and an Arminian about God’s Sovereignty that we thought was dead on. In fact, we kind of wonder if Roger is bugging some of the conversations we’ve had. Déjà vu much? And since Roger has argued that Open Theism should be included under the broader umbrella of Arminianism, you can just substitute “Open Theist” where you see “Arminian” and it won’t make a bit of difference.
Here’s a snippet of the conversation from Roger’s post:
Arminian: “How does God love those he predestined, foreordained, to hell?”
Calvinist: “He gives them many temporal blessings.”
Arminian: “You mean he gives them a little bit of heaven to go to hell in.”
Calvinist: “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.”
Arminian: “That’s what it sounds like to me.”
Calvinist: “That’s because you don’t understand God correctly. God is infinite and beyond our comprehension. So God’s love is not the same as our love. It transcends it.”
Arminian: “How is that different from saying God is ‘supercalifragilisticexpialadocious’?”
Category: General
Tags: Arminianism, Calvinism, God's Love, God's Sovereignty, Open Theism, Roger Olson
Related Reading
Support for Open Theism from Science and Experience
I have discussed the scriptural support that depicts the future as partially open and that God knows it as such. I do this in God of the Possible. If a position is true, every avenue of reflection ought to point in its direction, including science. What follows are two more “pointers” to the view that the…
The Future of Theology
Chris Moore via Compfight Roger Olson recently published a blog arguing that there really are no new ideas out there in the realm of theology. Everything has pretty much been thought of or proposed. That idea or book that’s causing such a stir? Rewarmed material that someone else already thought of. So what is there…
Divine Wisdom
Why doesn’t God end it all and stop the slaughter? Why does God allow suffering and evil to go on so long? Here, Greg offers two possible answers to these questions. Option A is that all evil somehow is designed by God and somehow brings glory to him. But Greg thinks Option B is a better explanation, and it involves…
How do you respond to Romans 9?
The Deterministic Interpretation of Romans 9 Many people believe that Romans 9 demonstrates that God has the right and power to save whichever individuals he wants to save and damn whichever individuals he wants to damn. I’ll call this the “deterministic” reading of Romans 9, for it holds that God determines who will be saved…