I was surfing the net like I usually do and came across this well-written blog post by Jack Brooks of “New Covenant Living.”
I thought it was a good contrast between what Calvinists and Arminians believe concerning the doctrine of salvation… read below.
Arminianism turns Christianity inside-out and upside-down.
An Arminian theology of man in his fallen condition teaches that sinners still retain a natural capacity to desire God and trust in Christ. The Bible says we don’t. Romans 3:9-18 says that being “under sin” means that no one understands God; no one seeks God; everyone is spiritually worthless; no one does good; our hearts are full of spiritual death (v.13); we tell lies by nature, and our souls brim with cursing and bitterness; we love violence, and feel no fear of God in our hearts.
The natural man sets his mind on fleshly things because he is fleshly in nature (Romans 8:5), and is hostile to God. The natural man is incapable of obeying God (Rom. 8:7), and is incapableof pleasing God (v.8). The natural man is not able to accept — not just intellectually grasp the contents of the Bible, but to embrace — the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him, and he has no ability to truly understand them (1 Corinthians 2:14). The natural man is spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1), controlled by the spirit of Satan which animates all of human civilization (2:2), and his will is controlled by the lusts of the flesh and of the mind. Everyone is a child of wrath by nature (2:3).
Arminianism insists, whether by explicit teaching or by an underlying implication of other claims made, that there still issomething in the natural man, however microscopically tiny, that is capable of repentance toward sin, desiring reunion with God, and trusting in Jesus Christ. Despite conservative Arminian claims about the great darkness of human sinfulness, it still limits God’s converting grace to enablement, not bestowal.
What i mean by that is that, in Arminianism, all God’s grace does is “clear away fog”, so to speak. Arminian grace provides providential help in the form of outward Gospel opportunity (a tract comes your way, you turn on the TV and there’s a Billy Graham telecast on, a friend tells you about their faith in Christ), and it provides inward clarity of thought (often called “conviction”, in Dallas seminary circles), but it does nothing more.
The desire for God, the desire to repent of sin, the desire to believe in Jesus Christ — where does it come from? It comes from you, not God, according to Arminian theology. This is an issue of origin. Whence does the desire to repent come? The desire to find God, the desire to trust in Christ? Where does it ultimately originate from? The Bible says those desires originate from God. Arminianism says they originate from the sinner.
But Christ said that sinners have no ability to desire Him (John 6:44). Faith is a gift given by God (John 6:65). Arminianism, contradicting Christ, teaches that sinners do have power to want Christ and believe in Him — God doesn’t give them faith, He assists their Adamic (misdirected, or perhaps dormant) power of faith. Arminianism denies that faith is a gift. Faith is said to be a natural mental faculty that God urges, exhorts, pressures, and convicts the sinner to exercise to saving effect. Bruce Wilkinson, founder of Walk Through the Bible, presented a typically Arminian view of faith when he said it was no different than the “faith” we use to decide whether to sit down on a chair. But the Bible teaches that repentance/faith is a saving charism, not a natural faculty, planted by God into the spiritually dead mind.
Arminianism teaches that God elects us for salvation because we chose Him first. That is what’s meant by the doctrine of foreseen faith. Election in Arminian theology is conditional on faith. The Bible says, in direct contradiction, that we choose Christ because He chose us first. Christ said that all sinners given to Him by the heavenly Father infallibly come to faith in the Savior (John 6:37). Of that group, none lose their salvation (John 6:39). Sinners come to Christ because God appointed them to eternal life (Acts 13:48).
The election of God, working through the sanctifying influence of the Spirit, is unto obedience, not because of obedience (see 1 Peter 1:1-2).
Arminianism teaches that God never irresistibly directs the will. But the Scripture says that God does indeed do that (Proverbs 21:1, Psalm 105:23-25), without God in any way incurring sin (James 1:13-14). The Scripture’s psychology of volition denies the doctrine of libertarian will-freedom.
The natural human will is completely subjugated by lust, foolishness, and Satan’s influence, according to Ephesians 2 and the rest of Scripture. Christ said that the tree produces the fruit. Bad trees are incapable of producing good fruit. Vipers can’t speak good words. The mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. Good acts come from good heart treasures. Bad acts are caused by bad heart-treasures (Matthew 12:33-35). We’re not sinners because we sin. We sin because we’re sinners. So the human will is not free. It is not free from God’s directive influence, not free from inward depravity, not free from demonic possession.
To affirm the typical doctrine of free-will, you have to deny the Bible’s teachings about the evil nature of man. People with evil hearts are incapable of making virtuous choices.
Arminianism teaches that salvation is based on a lifetime of faithfulness to Christ in addition to faith in Christ, not faith alone, and in that way ends up turning faith into a good work. A real Wesleyan, when asked if he’s going to heaven when he dies, will say, “I’m on the road!”. But the Bible says that faithfulness to Christ is a proof of faith’s reality (as when it endures the tests of affliction and persecution, 1 Peter 1:6-7). If we deny Him, He will deny us because our denial He never knew us (Matthew 7:21-23).
This is why I say Arminianism, when applied with rigorously consistent logic, ends up teaching works-salvation. This is why John Wesley said (in his Methodist Minutes of 1776) that we workfor eternal life, not just from it. Wesleyanism waters down the corrupting after-effects of Adam’s sin. It uses the doctrine of universal prevenient grace (a doctrine that the Bible doesn’t teach) as a knife to cut through the Gordian knot of original sin and spiritual inability that Adam’s transgression tied into our hearts. It makes God’s saving of us dependent on us. This requires a view of God that says some of His actions aredependent on His own creation. This waters down His omniscience and omnipotence, which then undermines our faith, and thus damages our prayer lives.
Arminianism teaches a view of will-freedom that makes it impossible for God to know the future. This is because the future does not yet exist, for God to “see” it. God cannot see the non–existent. Twenty years from now is not “happening” somewhere, for God to look at it. Because all the events of tomorrow are part of the natural creation, therefore the events of tomorrow have not happened. This is an implication of creationism. Creationism rests on the foundation of the law of cause-and-effect. An effect (tomorrow) can’t pre-exist its own cause (today), because creation is not eternal. God cannot see that which does not exist, any more than God can make a square circle or make 2 + 2 = 7.
Because Arminianism teaches that salvation is conditioned on anentire lifetime of believing, and teaches that faith is a naturalfaculty of the soul (not a gift from God), Arminianism means that it is impossible to experience any assurance of salvation — since “salvation” means “going to heaven and not to hell when you die”. The Bible says, “You can be sure right now that you will go to heaven when you die, because God gave you your faith and He will preserve it.” Arminianism says, “No, you can’t know that you will go to heaven when you die, because your faith originates out of you, not God, and God doesn’t promise to protect you from the overwhelming temptations from Satan that would cause you to lose your faith.”
P.S. (8/23/07): Saying something is true doesn’t mean it istrue.
Arminian theology will insist that they do not believe that part of the human soul is still capable of natural faith or naturally desiring God, and that it is unfair to say that they do. They will heap up dark quotations from Arminian theologians (as Roger Olson does in his book Arminian Theology does) about the wickedness of natural man in Adam. However, Arminian evangelistic theology does, in fact, teach that the natural man is capable of desiring God. It is a linchpin of the system.
Resorting to the doctrine of prevenient grace does not supply a defense against the criticism. When an Arminian theologian (say, John Wesley or Norman Geisler) says that God’s prevenient grace makes it possible for a sinner to choose Christ, he is necessarily implying that the ability to want God pre-exists the prevenient work of the Spirit.
The desire for God is not caused by the prevenient work of the Spirit. That would be the Calvinistic view. And the devil certainly wouldn’t put a desire for God into anyone’s hearts. So the ability to desire God is, by process of elimination, a natural faculty of the soul. There are only three candidates for the origin of the desire for God: God, Satan, or the person himself. If God does not cause the desire for Himself, and Satan certainly never would, then that only leaves one candidate: the person him or herself.
Working from that presupposition, Arminian evangelistic theology will go on to attribute to the Spirit a prevenient work of “stirring up”, or “awakening” the soul. The grace of God doesn’t cause faith. It merely enables or assists the sinner to desire God.
But you can’t enable or assist an ability that doesn’t already exist. The ability to trust in Christ must already be there, for the prevenient grace of God to enable or assist it to potentially work right.
Arminianism denies that the Holy Spirit puts the desire for God into the soul. Therefore, the natural man still has a natural potential ability to desire God. Even when Arminians say that faith is a “gift”, they still insist that there is something in the sinner which must ‘accept’ the gift. But what inward motivation moves the spiritually-dead sinner to accept the gift of faith? Does the desire to accept the gift of faith come from God, or come from the sinner? The Bible says that sinners are not capable of desiring, welcoming, or accepting the gift of faith — because they aren’t capable of any type of righteousness at all. Accepting the gift of faith would mean reconciliation with God, which none of us desire, since we all hate God by nature.
This question of just how dead is “dead”, is a fundamental dividing line between the Arminian view of sin and the Bible’s description of the human soul as dead through-and-through. Because, if it’s true that sinners have no ability to desire God — not just a suppressed ability, or a distorted ability, or a misdirected ability, but no ability — then Arminian theology falls apart.”
What was frustrating is the fact that he kept trying to go back to his stories. So I just had to cut him off and bring him back to the most important issue that he has… that he must stand before God one day and give an account of his life! I said, “even though those issues are legitimate problems and I sympathize with you, if you will repent of your sins and trust in the Savior you will be saved. I’m not saying that Jesus will rid you of your problems, but He promises to give you joy unspeakable and peace in your heart even in the midst of your pain and suffering. You can’t get that anywhere else but in God. I told him that if he were to die tonight, he would surely go to hell. He just looked at me. You need to repent and trust in Christ and he will save you. I went on to explain the whole Gospel starting with the depth of our depravity and not being able to meet the righteous requirement of the Law, our need for a Saviour, and Christ dying on the cross for the sins of the world. After this we prayed and I exhorted him to go home and ponder the things I spoke to him. 
Roger Servin
Eric Lopez
Sonny Burrell
