Ok, this Lutheran thing is way too long for me to follow, so at the risk of raising the iMonk’s ire at a trivial response, let me just put it as plain and as simple as I can: If God can do anything He wants (after all, He’s God), and He says He wants everyone to be saved, then how come everyone isn’t saved?

All the answers I’ve ever gotten on this fall into three basic categories:

  • God doesn’t really want to save everyone, thus only those He wants to save are saved.( (Grossly simplified, this is Calvinism.)
  • God wants to save everyone but He can’t, because He somehow managed to make creatures who are autonomous enough to reject Him. (Grossly simplified, this is Armenianism)
  • God does save everyone, so shut up and sit quiet. (Grossly simplified, this is Quakerism.)

Each perspective requires some form of hermeneutic gymnastics that selects passages that favor the answer chosen while de-emphasizing problem verses. Watch a Calvinist explain “He is not willing that any should perish” sometime, it’s entertaining. Or an Armenian deal with “He who the Father gives me I will in no wise cast out.” Quakers, of course, solve their problem by simply ignoring most of the NT, and reading Ben Franklin instead.

As for my self, well, I refer to Rule #35. And I note with some satisfaction that the iMonk has adopted pretty much the entirety of my suggested revision to Rule #9 verbatim. It’s like the new phone books in The Jerk; I’m somebody!