hopefully the new adam doesn’t have fallen human parents
Whoa, where is that? I think that’s just pop culture 
isn’t it?
Indeed… Not quite as bad as the magic Christian notion that it is because a magic fruit transformed the universe into into one of death and evolution making human beings all evil by nature so that God can torture them all for eternity if they don’t let a Xtian church racket extort money from them. But bad enough. It is still wrong. Children not only get bad habits from everyone around them (not just parents), but often make up some of their own as well. Cain didn’t get murder (fratricide even) from Adam and Eve. But it is still connected. It is part of the nature of sin to spread like a degenerative disease devouring everything. So while the Calvinist idea of total depravity is wrong there is a grain of truth there – for total depravity is where all sin leads eventually. But it is easy to see in the Bible that total depravity is wrong, where God is often finding good things in people. So it is not that people cannot do anything good, but that the good in them cannot defeat the evil which is also there.
Might as well finish of the rest of TULIP…
Unconditional election? Election is not about salvation but about God choosing people for a role in His providential work. Those who are elected might not be saved and those who are saved might not be elected.
Limited Atonement: Christ died for all. But God requires us to make a choice. He may have to liberate our free will before we can make such a choice. But is WE who choose whether to accept the gift or not.
Irresistible Grace: Grace may only require the smallest crack in the door… a desire for the desire to be saved and to feel repentance. But we still have to want at least that much. And yes that means that some feel they are dragged kicking a screaming through door when the larger part of them do not want to change their life. But there are those who harden their heats and choose their sin over goodness, allowing no cracks anywhere for God to get at them.
Perseverance of the Saints: Even asking the question of whether you can lose your salvation is to throw faith out the window. This one transforms faith into entitlement which is behind all the most terrible things that Xtians have done in history. It is nothing less than an abomination, turning Xtianity into something evil.
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(just some humble observations for awareness… for all your protestations on the other thread about how you recognize everyone’s views of God are subjective and would never call another one wrong, rather simply lay out your own view for comparison… it seems to this observer that regarding many people’s “declarations of belief” with which you disagree, you are in fact quite quick to say they are “incorrect”, rather than simply giving your own view for comparison, no?)
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Who is Model? So we’re tabulæ rasæ then? There is no genetic component to human nature? Apart from environmentally determined sliding parameters, axes? We’re not pre-wired for experience? Psychopaths are made not born?
?
Um, he did.
my wife and i do foster care and tgat seems to be the general cps take on tge matter: parents are to blame
uh oh, hopefully he doesn’t pick up their bad habits
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My sibs and I used to joke with our parents that we should pay for their counseling for what we put them through!
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Eric, appreciate the honest discussion we’ve been having… let me toss out some thoughts that may help clarify the discussion a bit. And I apologize in advance for the length.
First, a comparison: you very often find Christians in the United States that divide over questions of baptism. On one side you have Christians that baptize infants, and find it appropriate to do so by pouring or sprinkling. On the other side, you have Christians that believe only adult believers should be baptized, and that it is only appropriate to do such a baptism by full immersion. And even though those two questions seem to go hand-in-hand, it is important to distinguish them. It is conceivable for a Christian to endorse infant baptism, but believe that all baptisms must still be by immersion. It is also hypothetically possible for a Christian to believe in only adult, believers baptism, but to believe that sprinkling is in appropriate method. Those two separate concepts, while often very intertwined, still need to be separated and distinct when discussing them.
Similarly, the question of “free will“. There are two entirely different questions going on, that must be kept distinct, even if they are often cominglednin discussions. And I would recognize that John Calvin himself may not have been as clear as he might have which sense of free will he was talking about on any particular occasion.
So, by “free will”, we can mean
A) a will that is so uncorrupted, untainted, or undamaged by sin (or any other factor) to the degree that it is free to choose righteousness completely and freely. Will that is entirely and completely free to choose to sin, or cues not to sin. That is typically the definition that Calvin is working with when he either affirms or denies “free will”. Hence why he could so easily endorse the idea of Adam having “free will“. I do not endorse this kind of free will, partly because it is common sense, partly my own experience which resonates from what I see in Scripture… e.g., “But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.” “A bad tree produces bad fruit”, “ I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”
(Also of note, it was this sense of “free will” that Luther was also writing against in his work, “The Bondage of the Will”. He wasn’t arguing the will was “bound” because, if we had been predestined, then we “really” had no choice and we were bound to do what God had predestined… rather, (to borrow from Wikipedia)…
Luther’s response was to reason that sin incapacitates human beings from working out their own salvation, and that they are completely in capable of bringing themselves to God. As such, there is no free will for humanity because any will they might have is overwhelmed by the influence of sin.
But, to complicate the discussions, free will can also be used in another sense:
B) a will that has no external coercion, i.e., the choice comes from within that moral agent’s capacity to choose. The agent is not forced or coerced from any external agent, nor does the agent become a puppet or automaton, going through motions that are actually dictated and forced from without. Rather, the agent himself makes a genuinely free choice.
We Calvinists typically deny free will in sense “A” (hence our doctrine of “total depravity”), while we affirm it (as did Calvin) under sense “B”. This is why Calvin can consider Adam, before the fall, and happily affirm that Adam had “free will”, and you can detect in his quote he meant it in both senses.
But do keep in mind that these are two separate questions. A person could in theory entirely deny predestination, maybe even be an open theorist that denies gods knowledge of the future, and yet believe that our will is not “free“ in the sense that it has become so corrupted that one might say it has become “enslaved” to sin.
Alternately, a person could conceivably affirm total and complete predestination, that every choice of ours was predetermined actively by God, and yet, when he looked at the human will, he might believe that our own choices have not been corrupted in any significant sense by our nature, and thus our will, morally speaking, is completely free, even if he affirmed gods predestination of those free choices.
The take in our household is that the Fifth Commandment (Reformed numbering) is to help your parents obey the Sixth: Thou shalt not kill!
The corollary to that is that it only seems like your life is long upon the earth if you obey your parents. 
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Now, I do not ascribe to Molinism, but I do find its ideas an interesting thought experiment that can demonstrate the compatibility between an agent making a free choice and God also choosing for that choice to be made.
Consider the philosophical approach of possible worlds, if you’re familiar. Imagine two identical possible worlds, identical in every conceivable manner, except for the fact that in world A, I freely chose to have raisin bran for breakfast, and in possible world B, I freely chose to have Cheerios for breakfast. I imagine you would grant the reality that my choice could be genuinely free in either one of those possible worlds. There is nothing that constrains my choice, forces my will, “makes” me a puppet, in either of those possible worlds.
Now, consider, God looking through the ages, he has the power to start the universe in different ways, and he essentially has the choice of which one of those two possible worlds to make happen, or to actualize. He has an entirely free choice, to set possible world A into motion, or set possible world B into motion. So he chooses to actualize, to set into motion, possible world “A”…
So who’s choice was it for me to have Raisin Bran this morning? Did God choose for that state of affairs to exist? Did I choose for that state of affairs to exist?
I for one have no issue or hesitation whatsoever to answer “both”.
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He didn’t seem to…
He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.
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It’s tongue in cheek. If humans only sin because of bad habits picked up from parents, then Jesus being fully human is equally likely to sin as anyone else.
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Concur, and well said!
I’m finding this discussion intriguing, since it challenges what I thought was meant by the term compatibilism. Perhaps because I’ve only read of it in a theological context, I’m used to it referring to the claim that humans can be responsible for what they do even in the absence of free will where their choices are set by God. So it is the compatibility of divine determinism with human responsibility, not divine determinism with human freedom.
But in this thread (and apparently, also elsewhere outside of theological formulations), it does seem that compatibilism is presented as both God/fate and humans determining the same choices. I’m not sure what to make of that, especially since in my experience, Calvinists are among the fiercest critics of such a view.
Consider two robots. The first is given a program to follow a sequence of actions, and it does so unerringly. The second is made to want to follow the same sequence of actions, and it does so unerringly. The first would seem to lack the type of free will you’re referring to, since its programming is external to itself. The second, in which the programmed desires are part of the robot’s makeup, would seem to possess that free will. Yet while the second faces no external coersion, it still can only follow the script set for it.
Does a robot cease to be a robot if it has been made to want to follow every piece of its unalterable programming?
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Calvinists who are terribly unfamiliar with Calvinistic doctrine are indeed the fiercest critics of this view. I have met some of them myself, and I love to quote the basic Calvinist creeds or the like to remind them of historic Calvinist doctrine, which they are denying. They are the reason we coined the term “hyper-Calvinist,” after all…
But as man by the fall did not cease to be a creature endowed with understanding and will, nor did sin which pervaded the whole race of mankind deprive him of the human nature, but brought upon him depravity and spiritual death; so also this grace of regeneration does not treat men as senseless stocks and blocks, nor takes away their will and its properties, neither does violence thereto; but spiritually quickens, heals, corrects, and at the same time sweetly and powerfully bends it; that where carnal rebellion and resistance formerly prevailed, a ready and sincere spiritual obedience begins to reign, in which the true and spiritual restoration and freedom of our will consist. (Canons of Dort)
God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (Westminster Confession Ch 3)
Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, He ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently. (Westminster Confession Ch 5)
God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined, to good or evil. (Westminster Confession Ch 9)
we allow that man has choice and that it is self-determined, so that if he does anything evil, it should be imputed to him and to his own voluntary choosing. We do away with coercion and force, because this contradicts the nature of the will and cannot coexist with it. (J. Calvin)
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This is what I meant earlier in telling Eric that I think libertarian free will, in its absolute fullest sense, is simply and entirely logically inconsistent. Whatever world view we have, we believe that our nature was given to us by some other entity, process, or force. Whether that was by God, the evolutionary process, etc., something or someone outside of our own being “determined” our nature, the nature which limits our choices to various extents.
Can you conceive of any world view that believes otherwise? unless we are the cause of our own existence, and we ourselves determined what our very nature would be, then in that specific and limited sense, we are not “free,” but I do not see a way around that in any conceivable world view. the only exception would be a view where human existence was not merely pre-existent, but self-existent, wherein we were the initial, conscious, and sole cause, designer, and creator of our own nature. I know of no such perspective, though i may be unaware.
Also, consider… Most theologians across any and all spectrums seem to agree that in our eternal, glorified state, we will be “unable to sin” (Augustine used the phrase “non posse peccare”, not able to sin.”) … not that we will lack the capacity to make that choice, but we will lack any inclination for that choice whatsoever, and have such a renewed and glorified will that desires and loves the things of God, that willfully choosing to sin, from such a renewed, redeemed, and glorified state, will be literally inconceivable. This seems to be pretty consistent across Christian creeds.
But no one ever seems to worry that we will be robots in eternity. If anything, we will be finally and truly free. as we’ve never been before.
But insofar as we are able to make real choices within that free will and capacity for choice that we have indeed been given, then yes, we are free, as free I would say as basic logic would allow.
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There are matters of belief and there are matters of demonstrable fact including what is plain for all to read in the Bible. If someone says they do not believe what the Bible says, I will not say they are wrong. But if they say the Bible teaches reincarnation or the doctrine of the Trinity, then I certainly will say they are wrong because it is not so. Likewise if they say quantum physics is about consciousness altering reality or that we can make perpetual motion machines, then again I will say they are wrong because what they say simply isn’t so. But if they say they believe in fairies, or UFOs, or psychics, or healing crystals, then I will not say they are wrong just because I have no reason to believe in those things. And if they talk of their God ruling by fear with a protection racket then I will not say their God does not exist but only that such a being will always have nothing from me but my enmity.
What does that even mean?
You can program the robot to say anything and even write a secret diary talking about wants and desires but since it is just doing what it was programmed to do, I don’t see where it is “made to want” anything. That sounds like a contradiction of terms to me, so I don’t even find the question to be coherent.
You can say I am an incompatibilist precisely such a reason. Without an open future where we make the choices of what we become and what we desire, I see no reason why we would be described any differently from the robot who simply is programmed to do what it does.
But if you could somehow make a robot do such things… make its own choices of what it becomes and what it desires… then I am not sure it should be called a robot any more.