TD,
You’re an Arminian. Nothing wrong with that – so am I, to a point. I grant you that it’s impossible to put people into neat little boxes, but your leaning, from all that you say, is clearly toward that theosophy.
Arminians (generally speaking) believe that:
God loves all people.
God desires that all be saved.
All are not saved.
Therefore God does not always get what He wants.
God can do all things that can be done, but saving someone who does not choose it and still maintaining that person’s free will is not a thing that can be done.
Arminius’ problem was that he, like Calvin and Augustine, assumed that no one could be saved following the physical death of the body. Arminius believed that death was the deadline beyond which God either could not or would not work to save His beloved ones. In fact, scripture does not teach this. There is far more evidence in scripture for the possibility and probability of postmortem salvation. (Please see Sherman’s thread on this topic for scriptural evidence: Evidence of Post-Mortem Repentance/Salvation) Arminius also believed that the human soul is immortal in and of itself. Scripture most emphatically does not teach this. That is a Platonic precept completely unprovable from the word of God.
Because the soul is not immortal in and of itself, God can (and presumably would because of His love) destroy that soul that could not be saved. However if God IS able to save the soul of the one who died in his sins, He is obliged by His love to do so.
Since it is inconceivable that any person, given TRUE free will would continue for all eternity to choose that which brings him misery and pain, and since we know that God desires (and correctly translated, WILLS) that all should be saved, all must eventually come to the knowledge of God through Christ Jesus our Lord.
In order to have TRUE free will regarding this matter, a person must have the following:
Complete knowledge and understanding of the truth.
Complete rationality and sanity.
Sufficient time in which to contemplate his choices.
For a person to continue to do that which causes him pain and misery, that person must be irrational or insane. Therefore he is not free. For a person to continue to refuse the good because he believes it to be bad, that person must not have genuine knowledge of the situation; therefore he is not free to make the best choice based on all the information. For a person to be cut off from his choosing before he has had sufficient time to contemplate the right path, his freedom must be cut off short of his decision. Therefore he did not, nor does he now have free choice.
You say that people must be free to choose or else they cannot love. But most of the people in the history and the present time of the world have not been given true freedom to choose. And when they die, their freedom to choose is taken from them for all eternity. Too late.
This is an irrational and untenable position.
