New-Testament and early-Christian alternatives to select features of Augustinian and Calvinistic soteriology

There’s no such thing as “the sovereignty of God,” there’s simply GOD, Whose Kingdom transcends the limitations of exclusively deterministic causality, and Whose Son He appointed Sovereign of all creation.

There’s no such thing as divine “predestination,” there’s simply a divine destiny, and it’s conditional on our reception, by faith, of the regenerative power of the Gospel report about Jesus Christ.

There’s no such thing as “original sin,” there’s simply sin, and it’s neither inherited nor imputed to successive generations, although its effects do proliferate diverse evils throughout the world and through time.

There’s no such thing as “total depravity,” there’s simply physical depravity, but it cannot nullify the power of the Gospel record about Jesus to engender faith within the hearts of its sinful hearers.

There’s no such thing as “unconditional election,” there’s simply election, and it’s entirely conditional on human faith, which perfectly comports with divine grace and is caused by hearing the Gospel narrative concerning God’s Elect One, the Lord Jesus, if not sinfully resisted.

There’s no such thing as “limited atonement,” there’s simply atonement, and it equates to indemnification from sin on behalf of the whole human world without exception, accessible by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

There’s no such thing as “irresistible grace,” there’s simply grace, and it’s just as resistible as the Holy Spirit and Word of God are.

There’s no such thing as “sovereign grace,” there’s simply grace, which is endlessly available to all who simply believe, and only so long as they believe, the explanation of the Gospel about the Sovereign Lord Jesus.

There’s no such thing as “common grace” or “special grace,” there’s simply grace, and it’s exclusively experiencable by voluntary faith in the Gospel account about Christ the Savior, if we don’t harden our hearts against it. The creation is sustained by, and hence testifies eloquently to, God’s love and goodness and faithfulness, which we enjoy in common with all our fellow mortal sinners regardless of faith in Christ.

There’s no such thing as “perseverance of the saints,” there’s simply perseverance, which is sustained by the faith-generating power of the Gospel story of Jesus, which brings, in turn, the sanctifying indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

There’s no such thing as “eternal conscious punishment” for disbelieving human beings, there’s simply eternal punishment, which amounts to final extermination of both body and soul in a lake of fire (gehenna). (Satan and his sinning messengers, however, do suffer agelong conscious torment.)

Every qualifier is a minimizer, a limiter, an impoverisher. Let’s be done once and for all with Calvinistic soteriology, along with its varied toxic fragments within other Protestant traditions, and which radically debases so many essential concepts of Holy Scripture. [2/6/11;10/9-10/23]

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #50)

50.     Wasn’t the Cross necessary so God could forgive sins?

Only indirectly.  The problem lay in our own hard-hearted estrangement from God, so that we neither recognize our fatal sins nor change our minds and turn back to Him, much less beg for pardon.  Yet notwithstanding, no amount of divine forgiveness would pre-empt our demise, which would ensue anyway as the evil fruit of Adam’s sin and ban from the Tree of Life.  In the final analysis, such forgiveness would amount to little more than tokenism.  In upright forbearance, God often passes over penalties due to human sin; yet regardless, He still seeks to woo us back to Himself so He can lavish His Spirit on us with continuous fresh waves of love and life.  The refusal of people to turn back to Him and stay in His regenerative Explanation provokes His indignation and, sadly, can lead to premature and even final destruction.  The real problem requiring an efficacious atonement, therefore, is not how to get God to forgive our sins, but rather how we can possibly outlive death in spite of His kind remission.  We all suffer the identical semi-final result for our sins that Adam did for his and die despite every temporal pardon.  Or hadn’t you noticed?  That conundrum necessitates that we get drawn back to our Maker to acquire some elixir of life yet more potent than daily release from our accumulating debt of offenses (even dwindling though they ideally ought to be for those maturing in the love of Christ).  God unseated Sin by dethroning Death, not the other way around.  Only a Sinless One could conquer Death, of course, according to the equity of God’s justice.  Consequently, the ‘sin problem’ had already been solved (mostly) in Christ’s own sinless person before he ever took up his ultimate weapon—the Cross.  Yet had he not stayed sinless through this greatest of all Satan’s fiery trials and temptations to revile his tormentors, blaspheme God, and fend for himself, all would have been lost.  There could have been no display of the Father’s own righteousness, i.e., raising Christ from the dead.  Absence of Resurrection = absence of Holy Spirit = absence of the life-giving power of the Lord “our Righteousness” for us = the persistence of Sin in us = the continuing reign of Death over us = no hope for us.