Peter McKenzie

OK I accept your clarification – but you can see how I might misconstrue what you said there. The weakness of this mode of communication! I did read your articles. I am not sure they affect much of what we have discussed to this point – because I don’t disagree with much of what you say there. While I am not sure that your premise that John the Baptist died an unbeliever, it doesn’t really change the fact that I agree with you that he would have needed to make his own personal confession of faith. As for Judas, I think we will just have to agree to disagree there. I think there is too much conjecture that needs to be made as to his status – as it relates to his unbelief. Whether he had a knowledge of truth that he could have acted upon for his own salvation or not, I am not sure it makes a huge difference to our discussion. Even though he didn’t go away after he heard the words of Jesus (like the others) does not mean that Jesus wasn’t unhappy that he was still following him. After all, it was he that it was prophesied about that he would betray Jesus. There was a purpose for him continuing to follow Jesus. My premise is not affect by a scenario whereby all but one of the unbelievers left. The reason I say this is because the narrowing down of the crowd was still achieved by most of the unbelievers leaving. I know you had much more to say about him there but I know that you reject my premise, but it seems that you must be saying that Jesus wanted unbelievers to follow him – even with their wrongly motivated reasons. We may have to have a restart because we are at a place of misunderstanding each other frequently. You say it is weird to defend your belief that you have held for years. This may be a point where you are misunderstanding me. So I will try to state as clearly as I can what I believe about election: I believe that election is conditional upon one placing his faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. When an individual does that, he becomes part of the elect. But election as it regards individuals, is a moving categorical process. It has nothing to do with God choosing individuals to be elect before they were born (I know you agree here). It is individuals who determine whether they will join themselves to the “elected-ness” of Jesus. They are not pre-elected by God (I am making up words here to convey a point – that is how convoluted this has gotten because of Calvinist rhetoric). They are never pre-elected by God and never will be pre-elected by God. So God sets a condition on how one is able to join oneself to the ELECT. Election can be said to be conditional in that regard – from God’s perspective. So corporate conditionalism. From an individual’s perspective, conditional is a moot point – because individuals are not elected by God. There is no conditional election of individuals from the point of view of God electing individuals personally and individualistically. I know that is hard to follow – but I think it is necessary for me to go into more detail in order for you to see how I view election. To clarify, the demographic of the elect is WHOSOEVER. The condition set by God is that, for WHOSOEVER to join the elect, WHOSOEVER must believe. That is conditional election – full stop.