God is too smart to.....

Yes. I've heard them say it for decades. I have extensive experience debating Calvinism with trained Calvinists. Many from DTS. Some Calvinists are more forthcoming with this belief than others. As much as some Calvinist enjoy hiding in ambiguity, others don't mind recognizing what their beliefs entail. Irresistible Grace entails God overcoming the resistance of some. Just how can you deny this? You can try to parse your words in manner wherein you feel safe to deny this but the very presence of "Irresistible" speaks for itself? Can you at least admit this? If you can, we can have a productive conversation. 

Judas was one of the 12. He literally had the extraordinary privilege of personally, in person, telling Christ of his affection. As human beings, we often prefer to lie than to say what is really on our hearts and minds. Judas was a pretender. Most every human being has learned from their youth to "pretend". This life is designed to bring us back to reality. Most don't pay attention.  

What exactly is "gentle" about God overcoming any and all resistance? Please explain. 


Can you explain just how God forcing someone to love Him is "beneficial" to each party? I can honestly say, I believe the fabricated answers I've heard in response to this question, is very empty and extraordinarily unfulfilling. 

Consider this scenario,

1. If I say, God MUST love me, how is this supposedly able to fulfill my desires?  
2. If I say that I MUST love God, hows is this supposedly able to fulfill God's desires? 

I'm going to stop right here and hopefully wait for your responses. 

I edited the post. I think I got it right. Thanks

By "DTS" do you mean Dallas Theological Seminary? According to Wikipedia, "DTS is known as a center of modern dispensational teaching". While I will grant you that dispensationalists are generally arminianistic in their theology, in that Arminianism is also Calvinistic/ or "Reformed-ish" in some ways, an experience debating DTS students or staff over Calvinism as if they agree with Calvinism, doesn't sound like debating Calvinism. But I would appreciate it if you could give me some quote or a link to a quote where even the tone of what Calvinists say implies God accomplishing his decree by "force". Do you consider God to have "forced" you to exist? Is that all you mean by "force", concerning what you claim Calvinism teaches?



You say, "Irresistible Grace entails God overcoming the resistance of some. Just how can you deny this?" Then you add to it, as though you were on a roll to flatten my poor words out, "You can try to parse your words in manner wherein you feel safe to deny this but the very presence of "Irresistible" speaks for itself? Can you at least admit this?" Really? What makes you think I deny it? But notice how you couch your statement with: "overcoming the resistance". He doesn't bother to overcome resistance in the Regeneration referred to in TULIP's "Irresistible Grace". The term points to THIS PARTICULAR GRACE of regeneration, and the reason it is irresistible, is that God doesn't even consult the lost Elect, nor ask for their permission to do it. That is no more "forcing" than it is "forcing" to cause a baby to be born the first time.



(And if you do consider both of them as forcing, I would ask you to take a look at the difference between what prejudiced, rebellious, self-centered, angry Jonah said, and what the last of 3 servants of Matthew 25:14-30 said. Compare: Jonah knew the Lord— "I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity." But the lazy servant— "‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed." Guess which one God rejected!)



(I suppose you bring up Judas as an example of a pretender to further your notion that I am a pretender when I say that God is gentle and kind.)



Irresistible Grace does not refer to any other grace, and his graces are manifold. Don't take it farther than what it means. I don't call myself a Calvinist, but I know better than to accept your strawmen for Calvinism's doctrines.


You conclude with, "Consider this scenario,



1. If I say, God MUST love me, how is this supposedly able to fulfill my desires?

2. If I say that I MUST love God, hows is this supposedly able to fulfill God's desires?"



Sorry, but, what?? Who says God MUST love me? But, God does command us to love him. Where are you going with this? Or maybe I should say, where are you coming from with this?

I don't know how, in this format, to separate these points, like you did, to respond to each without putting what you said in quotes. 

Seems we are talking past each other quite a lot. For example, I don't understand why you bring up the fact different babies are born as a result of different circumstances. Seems irrelevant to me, yet you think it significant. Maybe you didn't get why I used that analogy. 

Talking to you makes me think of a Reader's Digest (I think it was) story of a doctor who saved the life of a boy who had full blown Rabies by immediate symptomatic treatment. I don't follow your argument, or at least, I don't see what your various claims here do to forward that, so I find myself dealing with each claim individually.  

You say that Calvinists parse their words a lot. So they do, and rightly so. But it is not the same as the equivocation that you seem to take it to be, but the simple necessity of precision needed to bring human thought into some semblance of reasonable apprehension of truth. I am unable to get my thoughts communicated well, and what's worse, my very words distract my thinking! Do you really think that you can get precisely what you mean across by mere words? Are they not even going to be taken wrong? But you say that you always say exactly what you mean. Amazing. I don't know of anyone except God that could do that. I recall the phrase CS Lewis used in Til We Have Faces: "...the babble we think we mean". Even our very concepts, nevermind our words, are child's prattle. We are all ignorant in that of which we speak. 

What Calvinists deny Grace to anyone? It is not ours to deny. I don't even say God denies it to anyone, as that is to turn the matter backwards. It is the unredeemed that deny Grace to themselves, as a matter of fact. ALL of us deserve hell, but God is gracious and merciful to those to whom he chose to show mercy. Why call this denial to the rest? The default state is of condemnation —not redemption. And what does "same blood" have to do with anything? Does 'election' mean nothing?

Again, this structure of self-determination rears its ugly head. Of course it objects to absolute predestination! But it comes from and is about a worldview where even this Christian life and the work of God is all about man, instead of about God. It is dead wrong. 

The lazy servant (Matthew 25) vs the one who knew God (Jonah) was an obvious contrast; you object to Calvinism as though it portrays an unjust God, as the lazy servant considered his master. But Calvinism portrays a merciful God. It is a matter of perspective. I will leave it there. 



1. So, your use of "MUST" is not that of obligation, but of logical necessity. Thank you for at least clearing that up. —On the other hand, on third and fourth reading...idk.  Lol. 

You say, "The Calvinist position is that God first chose [the elect] then crafted the means by which to redeem [them].". Well, I don't say that. That is anthropomorphizing. To me there is a causal sequence, that is not time-dependent, but even then I can only imagine which 'came first'. "The Elect" is meaningless without Redemption, and Redemption is not necessary without the fact of sin, and so the whole matter is, to my mind, and described from my temporal human viewpoint, 'spoken into fact' in one 'say-so'. 

2. 'Irresistibly' is only a reference to the grace of regeneration, not to its results.

Once again, I don't know why you 'go there', this time about compulsion. We aren't talking about compulsion, but apparently you think such phrases as "the Love of Christ compels us..." is not about compulsion. 

So, last, but not least, you say, "Even if you deny compulsion, you must admit that the primary cause view that Calvinist present results in 'God made me this way' theology." (I'm a bit surprised you go there. Orthodoxy, and even Arminianism, claims God as primary cause. It isn't just a Calvinist view. But I suppose you mean as primary cause is pervasive as cause in every particular for all time.) I do hold to primary cause in every particular, though I'm not sure that Calvinists in general do. While one of them says something like, "there is no rogue particle", another will say that monergism only concerns regeneration/justification —not sanctification— and deals with sanctification pretty much the same way the Arminian does. But no, I do not take the fact that God predestined absolutely every fact concerning myself, including those I am not even aware of, it does not mean that I have any excuse for being this way. To me, the way you treat it is typical of the self-determinist, not the Calvinist. No wonder you don't like it. And I like it, not because it gives me any excuse —it doesn't— but because it is an intense comfort (and even a joy in the knowledge God is doing what he planned from the beginning) and it gives me motivation to get up and pursue Christ. I find no reason to blame God for anything, but I do find my eyes turned from myself to God in amazement and thankfulness. "God made me this way, and is therefore obviously accomplishing absolutely everything he had in mind from the beginning concerning me", is more than even just a comfort. God is running this show. Not me.