Understanding God’s election
- Thread starter dougcho
- Start date
-
Christian Chat is a moderated online Christian community allowing Christians around the world to fellowship with each other in real time chat via webcam, voice, and text, with the Christian Chat app. You can also start or participate in a Bible-based discussion here in the Christian Chat Forums, where members can also share with each other their own videos, pictures, or favorite Christian music.
If you are a Christian and need encouragement and fellowship, we're here for you! If you are not a Christian but interested in knowing more about Jesus our Lord, you're also welcome! Want to know what the Bible says, and how you can apply it to your life? Join us!
To make new Christian friends now around the world, click here to join Christian Chat.
This last part is such a feeble argument. Please consider setting it aside. It would be of benefit to us all, including you, if you would do so.
So I wouldn't have to think or work too hard to ponder the fallacies involved, I followed @Inquisitor and asked AI - CoPilot so credit where credit is due:
Query: fallacious argument that says it's pride to choose to accept one's need for grace
Ah, yes—this is a subtle but significant misstep in reasoning that often masquerades as piety. The argument typically goes something like: “If you choose to accept grace, then you’re taking credit for your salvation, which is prideful. Therefore, true humility means you can’t choose—it must be entirely imposed or irresistible.” But this line of thought is riddled with fallacies.
Here’s a breakdown of the fallacious reasoning involved:
🧠 1. False Dilemma (Either/Or Fallacy)
So I wouldn't have to think or work too hard to ponder the fallacies involved, I followed @Inquisitor and asked AI - CoPilot so credit where credit is due:
Query: fallacious argument that says it's pride to choose to accept one's need for grace
Ah, yes—this is a subtle but significant misstep in reasoning that often masquerades as piety. The argument typically goes something like: “If you choose to accept grace, then you’re taking credit for your salvation, which is prideful. Therefore, true humility means you can’t choose—it must be entirely imposed or irresistible.” But this line of thought is riddled with fallacies.
Here’s a breakdown of the fallacious reasoning involved:
🧠 1. False Dilemma (Either/Or Fallacy)
- It assumes only two options: either grace is accepted by coercion (irresistibly), or any voluntary response is prideful.
- This ignores the possibility that one can humbly recognize their need and freely respond without claiming credit.
- It conflates acknowledging need with boasting in self. But recognizing one’s brokenness and receiving help is not pride—it’s the very definition of humility.
- As one writer put it, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” Choosing to receive is not the same as earning.
- The argument assumes what it’s trying to prove: that any human response to grace must be prideful. But that’s precisely what’s under debate.
- It presupposes that divine sovereignty and human response are mutually exclusive, rather than complementary.
- It misrepresents the position of those who affirm human response by caricaturing it as self-exalting.
- In reality, many who affirm a responsive role in salvation emphasize that even the ability to respond is itself a gift of grace.
-
1
-
1
- Show all
My remarks that you highlighted are not fallacious. Since GWH and other FWers insist that God's grace is not efficacious, then they must tell come up with something that IS -- something that finally got them to ultimately "choose" Christ. And that "something" can only be their "freewill" that, of course, is in bondage to sin, the devil and the world. It is this "freewill" that parted their Red Sea that empowered them to cross over from Egypt (death) to eventually occupy the Promised Land (life).
You obviously don't understand very well Arminianism or Pelagianism. And for your info there is no such thing as "synergism", for in FWer's world when one rejects the gospel, it's the sinner that is to blame -- NOT God! (No "synergism" there!) Yet, at the same time when a sinner believes the gospel and repents, the sinner ultimately takes the credit since he believes that his eternal destiny also ultimately rests in his own hands, i.e. his "freewill" choice (so NO "synergism" here either). Synergism is just a nice sounding, polite ploy that pays lip service to God's saving grace while the sinner simultaneously pats himself on the back for being smarter, wiser, more pious, more religious, more spiritually savvy, whatever...for making a good decision.
You obviously don't understand very well Arminianism or Pelagianism. And for your info there is no such thing as "synergism", for in FWer's world when one rejects the gospel, it's the sinner that is to blame -- NOT God! (No "synergism" there!) Yet, at the same time when a sinner believes the gospel and repents, the sinner ultimately takes the credit since he believes that his eternal destiny also ultimately rests in his own hands, i.e. his "freewill" choice (so NO "synergism" here either). Synergism is just a nice sounding, polite ploy that pays lip service to God's saving grace while the sinner simultaneously pats himself on the back for being smarter, wiser, more pious, more religious, more spiritually savvy, whatever...for making a good decision.
IOW you disagree that your arguments are fallacious. No surprise there.
Neither is there any surprise in your assertion of monergism against the synergism many do believe in and of course would define differently than you do, but that takes us back to the lack of concern for making fallacious arguments.
Neither is there any surprise in your assertion of monergism against the synergism many do believe in and of course would define differently than you do, but that takes us back to the lack of concern for making fallacious arguments.