Bubba said:
"He who would understand these matters, however, should think thus: God works evil in us (that is, by means of us) not through God's own fault, but by reason of our own defect. We being evil by nature, and God being good, when He impels us to act by His own acting upon us according to the nature of His omnipotence, good though He is in Himself, He cannot but do evil by our evil instrumentality; although, according to His wisdom, He makes good use of this evil for His own glory and for our salvation."
All double predestination means is that out of the sinful mass of clay that is humanity, God decides to initiate life through the Holy Spirit in what will be vessels of mercy and the rest He leaves in their sins, vessels of wrath. His soovereign choice. Yet, He nonetheless uses all people for the working out of His purposes.
With a very important qualification which I will provide below, I submit that the position represented by the above is rather obviously incoherent (in the specific sense of not being "sensible" or "understandable" to us)
if, and I emphasize if, we are
born in this defective state. I think I am raising the same objection as Vic C, the poster formerly known as "Vic".... :D .
I am sure you are all familiar with the argument: a person cannot be justly punished for actions that are beyond his ability to control. If Fred is a vessel of God's wrath, and there is
nothing Fred can do to avoid wrath, then we humans can make no sense of the idea that Fred will burn in torment eternally. Sure, we can
pretend that we believe it, but I submit this concept is really unworkable for us and is devoid of meaning. It is like saying we believe in the existence of round squares.
We simply cannot reconcile the notion of punishment (at least of the eternal variety) with notions of justice (and love for that matter), in the very specific case where the one punished does not have the power to choose a path other than the one that leads to punishment.
And now for the qualification: if the the non-elect are in fact
annihilated as I believe the Scriptures teach, the problem goes away. If Fred is "born bad" and is also part of the non-elect, there is no violent challenge to our deeply innate (and I believe trustworthy) sense of justice if Fred is annihilated at death. He does not suffer eternally for something beyond his control, he merely stops existing. And we cannot coherently claim that justice
demands a chance at eternal life for all. There is no basis for expecting eternal life in heaven even if we are "born" bad and cannot control that.
So Bubba, there is still a chance that I might come to believe in an elect in the sense that I believe you do. Not yet there, though.....
