Tom: That sounds fair, yeah. My basic point was just to caution us about too quickly concluding what has to be the case just because somebody is boasting.
Tom: I’m not trying to get LFW “off the hook” by pointing out something about determinism. I’ll try to steer clear of comparisons to determinism.
Tom: It’s not all God or all us, as if we think God’s mercy depends entirely upon us. Our ‘experiencing the benefits of mercy’ requires our choice, yes, but mercy precedes and defines everything about it—God’s offer of life is mercy, God’s sustaining us is mercy, God’s pursuing us in love is mercy, our capacity to choose is a mercy, our freedom is a mercy, our existence a mercy.
About Rom 9, perhaps that needs another thread, but I don’t understand Paul to be saying that our ‘experiencing salvation’ per se rules out free human involvement. Rather, I understand him to say that God’s choice to determine faith (and not law keeping or Jewish decent) as the condition upon which we are saved is a free and unconditional choice of God, one God makes freely and not in response to human perforce good or bad. Human beings don’t tell God what the conditions upon which we are saved should be. A libertarian would say that “salvation by faith exercised through free choice” is God’s free and sovereign choice for how we’re to be saved. It’s THAT determination that doesn’t depend upon us. But I can’t make any sense of Paul’s arguments if it’s true that Paul views “believing” itself as one of the “works” that he dismisses.
Tom