Thursday, June 14, 2007

Typical Arminian

In the inaugural Theology Talk, Jim McClarty and Jeff Young, of Grace Christian Assembly, sat down to discuss a recent anti-Calvinist message, preached by pastor Brady Cooper who is the senior pastor at New Vision Baptist Church located in Murfreesboro, TN. Jim and Jeff carefully and respectfully point out the assumptions, misrepresentations, and "straw man arguments" that are very typical of the Arminian approach to Scripture that seems to be so rampant in the SBC today. You can download this five part audio series HERE.

"What the Arminian wants to do is to arouse man's activity: what we want to do is to kill it once for all---to show him that he is lost and ruined, and that his activities are not now at all equal to the work of conversion; that he must look upward. They seek to make the man stand up: we seek to bring him down, and make him feel that there he lies in the hand of God, and that his business is to submit himself to God, and cry aloud, 'Lord, save, or we perish.' We hold that man is never so near grace as when he begins to feel he can do nothing at all. When he says, 'I can pray, I can believe, I can do this, and I can do the other,' marks of self-sufficiency and arrogance are on his brow."

"Arminianism is thus guilty of confusing doctrines and of acting as an obstruction to a clear and lucid grasp of the Scripture; because it mis-states or ignores the eternal purpose of God, it dislocates the meaning of the whole plan of redemption. Indeed confusion is inevitable apart from this foundational truth [of election]." - C. H. Spurgeon

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