Tag Archives: soteriology

How Free is Free Will?

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Over the last week I have been in a discussion over soteriology, which started with the request to define free will. Free will can be a hard concept to define because there are very different ideas of what it means and how it works.

This discussion was not with Michael Patton. However, he has written an excellent post entitled “A Calvinist’s Understanding of Free Will”, explaining free will from the Determinist/Reformed point of view. The points raised in this post are representative of the problems often cited against libertarian free will .

In this post libertarian freedom is defined as the ability to choose against who you are.

If you ask whether a person can choose against their nature (i.e. libertarian freedom) the answer, I believe, must be “no.” A person’s nature makes up who they are. Who they are determines their choice.

This definition may be how Reformers define and understand libertarian freedom, but this is not how proponents of libertarian free will (Arminians) would define it (noted later in the post). That aside, most proponents would agree with the idea that who a person is determines the choices that they make. Most would also accept the notion that a person can not choose against who they are. Continue reading →

The Justification Transposition

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Breaking Bad - Justification TranspositionIn the last post I shared some of my thoughts on the sequence of events in salvation. I compared these events to a chemical reaction in which a person that is condemned to death is transformed into a person that is reconciled and made alive.

Dead & Condemned → Alive & Reconciled

This process is started when grace is applied, giving us the Grace Reaction.

The last post also presented the chain reaction as it is understood in Reformed theology. That reaction looks like this:

Dead → Grace → Regeneration → Faith → Justification → Reconciliation

Examining the equation above we were left with the question: is it possible for someone to be born again (regenerated) prior to having their sins forgiven (justification)?

While the various aspects of salvation occur faster than the combustion of methane/oxygen (see video in last post), it can be helpful to slow things down and evaluate the steps based on their logical order.

Faith and Justification

There is little debate that faith logically precedes justification.  In Romans 4:1-5, Paul explains that Abraham was justified (credited as righteous) based on having faith. Continue reading →

The Grace Reaction

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Breaking Bad - Grace Reaction - EditA chemical reaction is a process that transforms the starting substances so that they have properties that are different than those prior to the reaction. These reactions can be graphically represented using a chemical equation.

As an example, methane and oxygen after the chemical reaction of combustion produces carbon dioxide and water. This is represented by the following equation:

CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O

The arrow in that equation represents numerous steps that occur before we end up with our two final products.

This is what that looks like:

Can you tell that school has started?

Interesting, but you might be wondering what this has to do with theology? Recently, I have been thinking through salvation, particularly on the sequence of events that allow a sinner condemned to death to experience reconciliation and new life. The more I thought on this, the more I started to see it as the Grace Reaction. Of course in theology this concept is more commonly known as the ordo salutis. Continue reading →