There is no way one can believe in autonomous free will and yet also have a firm understanding of the Scriptures, simply because the Scriptures contradict such a notion.
Note: This article was written before the author’s conversion to Orthodoxy.
But, it is not the Arminian’s fault, after all. Isaiah says of other men:
18 They do not know, nor do they understand, for He has smeared over their eyes so that they cannot see and their hearts so that they cannot comprehend. 19 No one recalls, nor is there knowledge or understanding to say, “I have burned half of it in the fire and also have baked bread over its coals. I roast meat and eat it. Then I make the rest of it into an abomination, I fall down before a block of wood!”20 He feeds on ashes; a deceived heart has turned him aside. And he cannot deliver himself, nor say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”
Now, it is exceedingly clear that God, in verse 18, takes full responsibility for doing something to men’s eyes and hearts so that they would be deceived. In verse 20, God speaks of the consequence of this action. These men CANNOT repent nor even say that they are deceived. Their will is simply not capable of the act.
This is why the Bible says, “There are none who seek after God” (Rom 3:11). How can one do His will, or even seek to do so, if apart from God opening his eyes he will have a deceived heart?
Now, there is not much more to say. This website over the last 2.5 years has drifted from Reformed apologetics to mostly commentaries and church history. Why? Because this issue of Arminianism is tiresome. It is an ignorant belief system lacking Biblical merit, which in my mind is easy to see. The only explanation for those who are insistent that Arminianism is correct is that they overtly do not appreciate the Scripture’s teachings or they are constitutionally unable to see them. Either way, it’s like arguing against a brick wall.
It is my hope and prayer this little blurb may help you, dear reader, increasingly appreciate the Scripture.
Orthodox Christian Theology 
“It is an ignorant belief system lacking Biblical merit, which in my mind is easy to see.”
Fist, you pull a scripture out of context to claim arminians are incapable of seeing, then you blame them for being ignorant? Um, if they are incapable of seeing, why are you blaming them for not seeing?
Well, perhaps we have a self-fulfilling prophecy here as if you were able to see the article, you would see I never blamed Arminians for anything 🙂
“The only explanation for those who are insistent that Arminianism is correct is that they overtly do not appreciate the Scripture’s teachings or they are constitutionally unable to see them.”
Well, either of your explanations make a large part of the church “ignorant”.
Many of us do see, from scripture that there are references to God blinding already rebellious people for a time and for a specific purpose. However,
I wonder what purpose God would have for causing a huge part of His church not to see Him as He is?
Either they or not part of His Church, or it is His will to give each a measure of faith so many do not have as full a measure as others.
And here I thought the veil had been torn away. God’s will has always been for people to know him fully. It’s only when they rebel that he uses even their rebellion to spread the Word.
I’m a bit confused about how believing that we are saved by grace through faith, as arminians believe and as the scriptures teach, means that we have a lesser faith?
Every man is a sinner, every man is a rebel.
Calvinism taken to it’s logical conclusion, means there are no rebels. Everyone does exactly what God wills them to do. In fact, they have no other choice. If they are born destined to be saved, they will be. If born destined to be reprobate, then they will never be saved, because they are not among the chosen few.
If we are not part of his church, then, it’s through no fault of our own.
But, of course, that is all directly counter to scripture, where God states again and again that he wants men to obey him, but they refuse. As is the case, here in Isaiah, where God’s people who were given the choice, rebelled against God:
Isaiah 43:26 Review the past for me,
let us argue the matter together;
state the case for your innocence.
27 Your first father sinned;
those I sent to teach you rebelled against me.
28 So I disgraced the dignitaries of your temple;
I consigned Jacob to destruction
and Israel to scorn.
God is justified in his anger here, only if he truly desires the love and respect of his people. If God is the one causing their rebellion, then turning around and blaming them for it, well, he would have to be schizophrenic.
Not really. Apart from the grace of God, all men act according to their nature, which is to rebel. Ps 81:11-12 states, ““My people did not listen to My voice, And Israel did not obey Me. So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart, To walk in their own devices.”
It appears you fundamentally misunderstand the difference between Calvinism and predestinarianism. I recommend you take 5 minutes and read the following, as it explains it: https://christianreformedtheology.com/2016/04/24/john-piper-ascribes-to-predestinarian-heresy/
That’s just quibbling over details that make no difference. What does it matter if God leaves me no choice but to rebel or actively causes me to rebel? The result is the same. The only cure is universal grace, where every man is given the opportunity for repentance.
Otherwise, God is causing the rebellion, whether by direct causes or secondary causes makes no real difference. Actually, I have more respect for Piper in the sense that he at least comes closer to admitting that Calvinism necessarily makes God the author sin.
Craig, Psalm 81:11-12 said these people of their own free will did not obey; it does not say they had a sinful nature which forced them to disobey, and they had no choice. The Orthodox Church endorses synergy, which the West accuses some of this view as semi-Pelagianism, as the Western non ecumenical council of Orange. It is the view of Cassian and the Church Fathers. Augustine seems to have not read Pelagius. At any rate, it is unfair to call Pelagius was a heretic unless we know we have his actual works, and these have not been tampered with. I am against Pelagianism, as it is called, God’s prevenient grace must come first before a man believes, but all are capable of believing, and God witholds this grace from no one.
I wrote this as a Protestant
Craig, I understand the baggage of heterodoxy is hard to overcome, and conversion to Orthodox theology is difficult. Consider the parable of the soils. My soil was filled with immorality before I converted, and some of this dirt from fallen thoughts fights against me after I converted. My background was not Reformed, so I can resist Calvinism. But there is some Lutheran antinomianism in me I must still fight off, and this alone is my Protestant side, it seems. Water, I am sorry I lost my cool. I did take it personally. I don’t want to have a Protestant side. Maybe I still do. My point is that we also feel Catholicism itself is just the flip side of Protestantism, and Filioque is a kind of Protestant private interpretation.
Wikipedia. Binitarianism.
In Eastern Orthodoxy especially, to deny that the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father alone but rather from both the Father and the Son, as the filioque states, is seen as tending toward Binitarian monotheism, or worse, bitheism. The Roman Church accepted and urged adoption of the filioque, which formed the theological rationale for the schism with the Eastern Orthodox in 1054. The Orthodox urge that these filioque statements must be rejected, because the theological understanding of the Spirit is directly attached to consequent notions of what the unity of God is, the unity of the gift of God in giving his Son and His Spirit, and thus what “salvation” means and by what principle it is lived out. In addition, the Orthodox view of theosis only allows humans to be united with God in his energies, but never with God’s essence, as God remains completely transcendent in His essence.
Binitarians look forward to their hope of being deified, and deny that the trinitarian or Chalcedonian doctrines uniquely assert anything necessary to a godly faith, along with Mormons. Nevertheless, as they do not see the strict monotheism or the trinitarianism of Eastern Orthodoxy as contributing anything essential and necessary, these binitarians see themselves as closer to the Eastern Orthodox, than to theosis as found in Western (Augustinian) Christianity, or the Mormon views of deification, as they understand these doctrines.
The Oriental Orthodox position is the same as the Eastern Orthodox position however they do not accept the wording of the Chalcedonian Creed.
Human nature is to have a choice, not to rebel or to obey. Human nature is not original sin (Augustinian), but ancestral sin (Romanides). Not guilt (Augustine) or depravity, but forbidden knowledge of good and evil (Romanides). Lack of life, grace needing to be born again (baptized; no Holy Spirit indwelling; only creation, natural, in God’s image and likeness, but no likeness to God (theosis) without a Spirit salvation experience. I think some people are truing to reconcile Orthodoxy with the Reformed Augustinian view, and this can never be done. Calvinism is heterodox. The Greek Old Calendarist Synod in Resistance speaks against the pan-heresy of ecumenism. Orthodoxy is against ecumenism, the syncretism of all Christian theologies. We can dialogue with the heterodox, but we can never convert to their heretical theology. They are in doctrinal errors and schisms, and Orthodoxy offers them grace and truth. If we fail to remain Orthodox, we will be lost in the pan-heresy of ecumenism. So dialogue is a risk to us, more than to them. Papism and Protestantism have many errors. But my moral errors come from myself when I was non-Orthodoxy, not from what I have received from Orthodoxy.
And all of this still doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out why you think a verse about God’s judical hardening of certain rebellious Israelites has anything to do with Arminian believers.
Read the article. If you do not understand the difference between Calvinism and Predestinarianism, you are not going to know what you are disagreeing with.
Calvinists sometimes lose their minds and become unhinged over the word “Arminianism”. That verse in Isaiah has nothing at all to do with either Calvinism or Arminianism. And Arminianism agrees with Eastern Orthodoxy. Man is wounded by the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and since man is not born innocent, he is born with the knowledge of this, and because of this he is tempted to sin, by sin. He is not dead in sin. He simply lacks eternal life, as all are born unregenerated, and regeneration comes from baptism. From the Holy Spirit and baptism Titus 3:5, Acts 2:38-39. Even Mary had the ancestral sin, but not original sin as original guilt in an Augustinian sense. Augustine was mistaken about many things, so, since Calvinism is based upon Augustine, not the Bible, Calvinism errs in its hamartiology and soteriology. Arminianism is not the full truth, but it is similar to Orthodoxy, that is all we can say, and the Arminian view is closer to the Church Fathers than the Calvinist views, and Arminius never put Servetus to death, and Calvin was a killer, unlike Arminius. Wesley’s views are a lot closer to Orthodoxy than Calvin’s. Because of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, the Crusades, Charlemagne, and Filioque, the Augustinian mandate to kill heretics was mostly in the West, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtering each other. Until in Russia, 17th century, and in England, Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and Protestants and Protestants, were slaughtering each other. So thus is 1666 in the climate of Calvinist slaughter, the Russian Orthodox church infected by the spirit of Protestant slaughter and persecution of heretics fever, the official Russians persecuted the Old Believers, and there was a meaningless schism between two sides that should have never split over this matter of the sign of the cross and liturgical reforms Nikon and Avvakum, 1666 Russia.
http://www.quora.com
What is the Orthodox Christian argument against “Filioque?”
5 Answers
Dimitrios Rentel
Dimitrios Rentel, Orthodox Christian
Answered Nov 22, 2017 · Author has 181 answers and 33.9k answer views
There a few main problems with the Filioque.
Firstly, Jesus himself states that the Holy Spirit does not come from Him – it comes from the Father. Jesus is just the medium in which it flows:
“But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me” (John 15:26, RSV translation).
So, Jesus said it comes from the Father, which makes me frustrated that this debate is even happening. Seriously. It’s in black and white. Sigh…
Secondly, and this is my biggest problem with it: It was not in the original Creed. The Church Fathers, at the First Council of Constantinople, established that the Holy Spirit proceeds for the Father and only the Father. Why did they state this? Read the Bible quote up there.
Third, the Council of Ephesus states that no changes can be made to the Creed. This is pretty big, actually, if you think about it – Christianity is forbidden to change its beliefs over time. Wow. There are, of course, larger ramificiations for such a canon, but the important thing right now is that the Filioque cannot be added. But it was anyway, which leads into my next point…
There is no doctrine, dogma, or canon backing up the Filioque. The way it was added into the Creed was like this: people though it made sense that the Holy Spirit came from Jesus, so they started saying it like that. Honestly – that’s how it happened. The earliest sayings of it we have is around the 5th century. The first time it was officially accepted by the Western Church was in the 9th century, at the crowning of Charlemagne. The pope at the time, Leo III, did not even want to use the Filioque, but Charlemagne insisted.
Finally, as there may be some people here who point this out: I am not opposed to the idea of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father through the Son (in fact, I subscribe to that idea heavily). The Son is the medium, the pipe in which the Holy Spirit flows through. This is what Tertullian (yeah, he’s a heretic, but he understood the Trinity pretty well), Origen (yeah, whatever), Maximus the Confessor, Gregory the Wonderworker, Basil the Great, Cyril of Alexandria, and John of Damascus believe as well (I’m sure there are others, but I was too lazy to look up more). But I heavily disagree with the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son in the way that It proceeds from the Father.
Note – I just checked to see what St. Augustine thought about this, given that he is the foundation for a lot of Catholic theology. He does indeed think that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, but he stresses that it does not come from the Son the same way it does from the Father. Interesting…
460 Views · View 6 Upvoters
sponsored by Honey
Are you getting the best Amazon price? This app will tell you.
The price Amazon shows isn’t always the lowest. Luckily, this tool can help you outsmart the marketplace.
Learn More at joinhoney.com
Related Questions
More Answers Below
What are the implications of the Filioque controversy in Christianity?
What’s the point of Filioque and Immaculate Concept?
What is the Christian argument against Christian fundamentalism?
What is the Christian argument against exegesis?
What are Orthodox arguments against Catholics and vice versa?
Ask New Question
David Pettit
David Pettit, Russian Orthodox Christian, American. Lifelong historian.
Updated May 28, 2017 · Author has 641 answers and 4.3m answer views
From the very mouth of Jesus of Nazareth, as quoted in John 15:16, there is exactly one place where the “Procession” of the Holy Spirit is mentioned. Only one. And Jesus very directly stated that the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father.
“Filioque”, meaning “and the Son”, was invented in the sixth century in a council in Toledo, Spain. The king of that place and time, King Reccared, accepted this invention and had it inserted into the Nicene Creed because it suited his needs. He, and the Council, were looking for a way to fight a heresy which claimed that Jesus was not fully God and fully man, and was somehow less than the Father. This idea of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Son became very popular in Western Europe to combat this heresy.
By the year 800, it had become so popular that the Bishop of Rome included it in the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day. This is one of the earliest attempts by a Bishop of Rome to unilaterally decide theological principles for every Christian, and was a power play to attempt to gain authority over all Christian Churches. By 1054, the divide between the Church of Rome and the other Churches had become so severe, revolving much around the Axis of this exact issue of the “filioque”, that the Church of Rome split from all the other Churches and went her own way. She then began inventing her own traditions, theology, dogma and revising history.
The main arguement against the “filioque” is twofold, at its root.
First and foremost, when Jesus discussed the “procession” of the Holy Spirit, which he is recorded doing only once, He very explicitly stated that the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father. That really should be the end of it. We really shouldn’t need to delve any further, because He stated it directly. But for those who believe that they are smarter than God….
Secondly, by claiming the “filioque”, the Church of Rome is attempting to redefine the very nature of God, contrary to His directly stated definition. Look, we don’t have a lot of understanding about the inner workings of the Creator of All Things, and He is pretty mysterious. But claiming that the Holy Spirit is subjugated under both the Father and Son places It underneath both, and a lesser part of the Holy Triad. We don’t know exactly why God made this Triune Godhead like He did, but we know He did it. We know that all Three work together in synergy to fulfill His aim, and that all Three are equally One God. There is no “Slave” aspect to Him, as the filioque would dictate.
So, in the end, the “filioque” states something that we know is not true. We absolutely know it. It is like stating that the sun is cold, or that the moon is made of cheese. It may be a convenient pleasantry for our political purposes to attempt a redefinition of God, but He is not subject to changing His State to meet our political needs.
We object to it because it is a flat out lie, we know it is a lie, can reference God Himself having said how the Holy Spirit “proceeds”, and will not follow a lie to fulfill a political aim.
614 Views · View 13 Upvoters
sponsored by Truthfinder
Have you looked up your name yet?
This new service reveals personal records for millions of Americans with a simple computer search.
Learn More at truthfinder.com
FrDamian Kuolt
FrDamian Kuolt, Eastern Orthodox Priest, Bend Oregon (2000-present)
Answered Mar 7, 2017
The Filioque was a pivotal dogmatic issue in the splitting of the Roman Church from the other Orthodox Churches of Christendom. Filioque is a Latin word meaning “and the Son” which was added to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Church of Rome in the 11th century, one of the major factors leading to the Great Schism between East and West. This inclusion in the Creedal article regarding the Holy Spirit thus states that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”
Adding it to the Creed is a violation of the canons of the Third Ecumenical Council in 431, which forbade any additions to the Creed. Remember, these Councils were the final authority of the early centuries; a time when every type of crazy teaching was being addressed and a central affirmation of Faith was defined to simply stand as the fundamental teaching of the Church. Accept the Creed; you were considered Christian. Change it, or reject it, and you were considered a heretic and non-Christian. The prohibition against including of the Filioque was reiterated at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 879-880. The Filioque was most clearly and definitively shown to be a heresy by the great Father and Pillar of the Church, St. Photius the Great, in his On the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. He describes it as a heresy striking at the very heart of what the Church believes about God.
244 Views · View 3 Upvoters
Phil Jones
Phil Jones
Answered Jan 15, 2017
John 15:16 explicitly states “proceeds from the Father.”
The Father is seen as the fountainhead of the Trinity.
There was no council representing the Orthodox that agreed to its use.
There are later canons that ban the modification of earlier creeds.
179 Views · View 5 Upvoters
Stephen Frantz
Stephen Frantz, Trying to understand how to properly be an apprentice of Jesus.
Answered Jan 13, 2017 · Author has 4.5k answers and 2.2m answer views
There are two arguments against it, I believe.
It was added without authority. The Roman Church added it without an Ecumenical Council.
It undermines the status of the Holy Spirit.
229 Views · View 7 Upvoters
Related Questions
What is Orthodox Christianity?
What do Orthodox Christians believe about salvation? How do they differ from Catholics and Protestants in that sense?
What is the Christian argument against pacifism?
Were you baptized as an Orthodox Christian?
Is Orthodox Christianity growing?
What do all orthodox Christians agree on?
Could the description of the Holy Spirit, as proceeded from the Father and the Son in Catholicism, be better worded so as to prevent disputes …
What do Catholic Christians think of Orthodox Christians?
How does one become an orthodox Christian?
Ask New Question
Still have a question? Ask your own!
Related Questions
What are the implications of the Filioque controversy in Christianity?
What’s the point of Filioque and Immaculate Conception?
What is the Christian argument against Christian fundamentalism?
What are Orthodox arguments against Catholics and vice versa?
What is Orthodox Christianity?
What do Orthodox Christians believe about salvation? How do they differ from Catholics and Protestants in that sense?