What is your heart’s desire?
The latter (PCA, specifically).
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I strive, with God’s help, to make it conform to God’s law, as stipulated in the Bible.
What is God’s law? [Sorry @LM77! Catechism and the Socratic method aren’t preferred: we’d rather write ‘systematic theology’ legalistic insurance manuals than have a full encounter with salvation which is just a tilt of the head away.]
A gentle reminder to everyone here that we prefer users to post in more than single sentences. If you ask a question, please also provide some background to the relevance of the question. Where possible please try to post a reasonable paragraph.
I would also kindly ask, as a Calvinist and a Reformed Christian myself, that we avoid the usual Calvinist tropes and straw men that often get rolled out along with these kinds of topics.
Thank you one and all!
Your sovereignly predestined moderator 
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As for me…
I am an incompatibilist libertarian open theist. I reject all five points of TULIP calvinism and I find a lot of the full statement of the Arminian articles of remonstrance to be even worse.
Total depravity: is wrong but there is a grain of truth there. Total depravity is where all sin leads eventually. But it is easy to see in the Bible that 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.
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 hearts 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.
so what does it mean to say I am an incompatibilist libertarian open theist?
libertarian means I believe in free will not as a magical addition but as a part of the self-organizing process of life itself. It is not universal, absolute, or guaranteed, but varies considerable between people and can be damaged by a great number of different things. Sin destroys free will and makes people predictable and easy to manipulate.
incompatibilist means I do not believe that free will is compatible with determinism or absolute predestination. I don’t think an already written future is even compatible with consciousness.
open theist means the future only exists as a superposition of possibilities. Knowledge is a form of power and as we have discovered in quantum physics to know the future is to create the future. Omniscient means God has the ability to know whatever He chooses same as omnipotence means God has the ability to accomplish whatever He chooses and not that He must do so.
As you can imagine, we disagree on pretty much every point.
Alas, I have less free time as late so can’t provide a fuller response. If I did you might be surprised to find that we might agree on some of the sub-points you have made, especially around choice, human goodness, and free will. Though we would likely even then disagree over definitions, extents, and first causes! But that’s OK. 
What I will say is this: I am grateful for this forum bringing together such a wide range of Christians across the theological spectrum. I’ve learnt a great deal from reading and interacting with those of wildly different theology to my own. Such as yourself and others. I hope that in some small way this has been a reciprocal process.
I am also glad that we can agree that sin is real and dangerous, that Christ is the Saviour and what matters most is trusting/coming to him as such. And of course, we can agree on the factuality of evolution by natural selection too.
At the end of the day, this crusty ol’ Calvinist is happy to take those ‘wins’ and sit this one out.
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For those wanting to get a good idea about what Calvinist’s believe. Whilst not perfect, RC Sproul’s Chosen By God is as good a place to start as any other.
Equally, for a good overview of Reformed Theology, I would heartily commend the surprisingly readable Heidelberg Catechism (1563). Which you can pick up on Amazon (though plump for one with scripture references) or read it for free, here:
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Jesus is so much simpler. Clean shaven. Compared with the shaggy dog story of predestined, justified, sanctified, glorified, five point tulips.
Warning!I feel like the conversation have become more of a "Calvinistic"topic and is moving away from the op
justified, sanctified, and galvanized.
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So what is the difference between the world and a DVD? Does God just have better technology to put more on his type of DVD? Are we just a movie on His shelf that He likes to watch occasionally? If our technology improves will the characters on our improved DVDs also have consciousness?
If the story is already written, I don’t see any difference at all – just inanimate objects no matter how fancy the technology. The characters have no legitimate reasons to feel responsible for their actions – their story was just written that way. Any feeling of responsibility is less than an illusion – just something the author threw in to make a more interesting story.
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To me it’s a lot like the arguments over prophecy. This is rhetorical, but related enough I felt it could be mentioned concerning free will. World vs. DVD mindset. But essentially it is , “ Is prophecy God forcing someone to do something or is it God proving his power through foretelling what he knows will happen.
Like was Judas forced by God to turn in Jesus or did Jesus know that Judas was going to betray him because his God who knows all things foreseen it and expressed it to his son.
So when it comes to predestination I think there is a big difference between God taking away peoples free will versus God already knowing what will happen. In romans 9 it mentions the Pharaoh. Many leap to that to prove Pharaoh was nothing more than someone created to be a vessel or wrath. But I think it’s equally plausible given the context of the entire Bible, to realize God knew Pharaoh was evil. So God simply helped influenced him to harden his heart more and more. I think the influencing happened much in the same way as with Ahab. His heavenly host.
So in the same way God uses the Holy Spirit to influence people, God also knowing the future will sometimes likewise use evil spirits to influence evil people. But it does not mean he made them evil or that they were not responsible for choosing that path. Hardening a heart of a evil man already hardening his heart is very different from ruining a good heart of a good man.
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Yes. I read the story of the Pharaoh in the same way.
Just because I don’t believe God created us to be robots or characters in a novel, and I don’t think He wants us to be that way, this doesn’t mean that we do not turn ourselves into robots with our own bad habits. And if we are going to wear such buttons on our sleeve making ourselves so easily manipulated then why shouldn’t God push these buttons for the accomplishment of His providence of salvation? Why should they be left only to the demons and evil people to take advantage of.
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Since the Bible teaches election, predestination, about God’s chosen and more, and it teaches the fact that we are responsible for our choices, please consider that God’s relationship to time and to us in time cannot be described by tensed language, which is the only language we have.
None of the rigid or ‘forcing’ metaphors people ascribe are applicable.
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thanks for opening a rabbit hole here with that time piece. I wish I had the time to go down it all the way
just trying to remember a book written with a variety of endings determined by your choice. That is how modern virtual reality game work as well and why they suck you in as you determine the outcome.
Remember SETI? Recently listened to an podcast of Unbelievable with Lennox and Davies in search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Find it funny that they did not figure out that we have received signals from extraterrestrial intelligence for millenia already, only that some people when being given the switch decided to turn of the receiver part of the equipment.
What does this mean?
Our brain is a receiver of signals of outside intelligence - until we flick the switch in puberty and declare it our inside intelligence in order to claim authority, thus to be God like. If you ever received what you perceived to be an “original idea”, have you ever wondered where it came from?
Interesting–but that’s more to do with identity as an individual, isn’t it? Honestly, I am not aware of anything I have done that is original with me, but I think that developmentally, I can see that it’s a construct. However, are you saying that we ignore extraterrestrial information? I don’t understand.
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The best word in the English language.