You wrote:
If we don’t chose then we make a liar of God. I see. Or we show our inpotence?
If we cannot choose, and yet God calls us to choose, then God is falsely implying that we can do something that we cannot do. But God cannot lie and therefore does not lie. Therefore, when God calls us, we can choose to obey, just as Mary “chose the better part” (Luke 10:42), and the Psalmist chose the faithful way (Ps 119:30), and the people of Israel chose to serve the Lord, according to the words of Joshua: “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen for yourselves the LORD, to serve Him.” (Joshua 24:22)
We also have Jesus clearly saying that God choses us not we him.
You are referring to John 15:16, where Jesus says to His Apostles, “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit.” Jesus is speaking about choosing the Apostles to be Apostles. He isn’t saying that all those who become Christians do not choose Christ.
How do we deal with this? Lutheran assert, and I would guess Calvinists, that “ought does not imply can”. We have this all over the OT. Follow the ten commandments! Do this! Don’t grumble! Does the law ever work? Can we be nagged into doing the right thing?
You assume that the OT is evidence that ought does not imply can. But that conclusion does not follow by necessity from the evidence. The fact that people under the law broke the law does not imply that through the grace God continually offered them they could not keep the law. This is how “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time” (Gen 6:9). This is how Job was blameless and upright. (Job 1:1,8; 2:3) This is how Joseph was a “righteous man.” (Mt. 1:19) This is how Abraham could have a discussion with God about the righteous and the wicked in Sodom; that conversation wouldn’t have been possible if all people are unrighteous. Does that mean that Noah never sinned? No, as Ecclesiastes 7:20 says, “there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.” So Noah was both righteous and blameless, and yet not without sin. That’s because though he sinned venially, he didn’t sin mortally. And that is true of all the OT saints, who died in friendship with God. They fulfilled the law not necessarily in the letter, but in the spirit of the law, which is the essence of the law. And the spirit of the law is agape. Because they had agape, they fulfilled the law, for as St. Paul teaches, agape fulfills the law (Rom 13:8, 10; Gal 5:14, James 2:8).
The old testament is an illustration that we cannot follow the law.
The Old Testament shows us that without the grace of God we cannot keep the law. But in the saints of the Old Testament, we see that with grace we can follow the law — see the saints described in Hebrews 11.
Love, hope and all good things happen because he first loved us. When we know what Jesus means to us, we cannot but love and adore him and cherish our fellow Christians and in fact all the world by proclaiming and serving. Like in any relationship of love, there is no coercion. Coercion is a love killer. It produces wrath. We know this. We are all in relationships. This is so real and so simple.
I agree (with a qualification) that coercion is a love killer. That’s precisely why we can choose. If we couldn’t choose, then our service wouldn’t be love, because love is free. People reject Christ not only because they do not know what He did for them. The problem is not fundamentally a lack of knowledge, just as Adam and Eve’s sin was not due to a lack of knowledge. They sinned by freely choosing against what they knew to be right. The solution to sin is not merely knowledge, just as the solution to crime is not merely education. It requires new dispositions in the will, and this requires sanctifying grace, which Christ gives to us through the sacraments.
God’s grace and mercy creates the faith which receives him and his gifts. Faith is not a work. Hope is not a work.
No one can believe for you. Faith is a gift from God, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t choose to believe. We believe (it is our will that assents to the revelation of Jesus), but we are enabled to do this by grace. That is why unbelief is a sin, because we do it, and we know we shouldn’t do it. Likewise, hope is not entailed or necessitated by God’s promise, because people can choose not to hope, even while knowing the divine promises. Such a choice is called the sin of despair.
We can build up or faith and hope and love, by God’s means, his word and sacrament. I can go and be nourished and strengthened. I can pray for help in the empty beggars way. And I can know that in him I have everything. And in him I also have brothers and sister who come to him just as empty handed and who know that they have been made rich in the same undeserved way. These are the most profound relationships. I love these brothers and sister so much, I do want to die for them if needed (so help me God).
I understand.
But what comes first is knowing how much God loved us and how he chose us (everyone in the all encompassing, positive way–contra Calvin–never excluding or limiting.)
I don’t disagree.
The helping of the lifting. You see, the requirement that I do my part by helping lift poses two problems. It implies that the strong man is either not able to or willing to just simply do it for me.
You’re overlooking a third alternative. He is graciously giving you the gift of being allowed truly to participate in what He is doing, just as all men live and move and have their being in Him. God doesn’t move our hand to our mouth at the dinner table; He gives us the gift of being able truly to participate in His creation. And He does the same in the order of grace.
Secondly, I cannot know if I’ve done my part.
Actually you can, through an informed examination of conscience.
Back to Bryan, in this connection, he also said that God is not a glory-monger. In fact, scripture says all over that the glory is God’s. In Isaiah we have several times, that we will NOT give his glory to another, that He HIMSELF is Israels savior.
The meaning there is that God does not permit His people to give to any creature the adoration that belongs only to the Creator. It does not contradict all the verses I mentioned in #74 concerning our participation in His glory.
In fact, and to contradict Bryan, we kow we have the right theology when God gets all the glory. This is like a litmus test. Please, think about it.
Here again you are going beyond Scripture (while treating your extra-Scriptural opinion as though it were Scripture). Scripture never says that God should get all the glory, just as it never says “cleanliness is next to godliness.” If God were to get all the glory, then no one could share in His glory, and thus no one could go to heaven. As Catholics we say, “ad majorem Dei gloriam,” (to the greater glory of God). God is more greatly glorified when through His grace His saints are made glorious. That is most evident in the life of the saint whose feast we celebrate today, St. Thomas Aquinas.
the Council of Trent's teaching that "they who by sin had been cut off from God may be disposed through his quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace." Then, explaining the Catholic position, he writes:
So, while a person is not "able by his own free will and without the grace of God to move himself to justice in his sight," he can and must cooperate with grace.
That is correct. If we cannot cooperate with grace, then we are left with the temporal nihilism I described in my previous post. In Catholic doctrine, grace does not destroy nature but restores and perfects it. Grace works faith into our hearts, so that we desire (implicitly or explicitly) baptism. In that way we cooperate with the Holy Spirit; we are not dragged to the baptismal font by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit moves us, not by coercion or violence to our will but by drawing us, so that we freely choose to be baptized. (I'm speaking of adult baptisms here.) In baptism we receive the "washing of regeneration" that St. Paul speaks of in Titus 3:5, and in that font we are justified, having our sins washed away, and receiving within us the righteousness of Christ. This understanding of baptism is what we find both in the New Testament and in the Church Fathers, as I showed here. Likewise, this same cooperation between the Spirit and the baptized believer who has committed sin leads him to the sacrament of penance.
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