OK--SO YOU'RE HUMBLE AND TRUST GOD. BUT WHY? GIMME A SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY!
(I apologize for the length and rambling nature of this post. Please read it through anyway, and comment)

Thus saith David Talcott. ;)

But I don't like systematic theology, whines I.

Ok, then, lay out for me the theological underpinnings and implications of the "theology" you laid out in such non-systematic terms in your last post, saith the imaginary voice of David Talcott in my head.

Hum...well, I suppose I could do that.

HAH! sez the voice. That's all a systematic theology is!

Oh.

Right, so a systematic theology of Orthodox soteriology from beginning to end is a bit of a tall order. I tried to do this for a paper last semester and, as a result, still haven't finished it, and got sidetracked from the topic anyway (it was supposed to be a research paper, and I prefer to hear myself talking, fool that I am).

But I will respond to a few points of David's last post. And hopefully eventually I'll get around to the more systematic side of things. It would help if there were just a book I could quote, but if there is, I am unaware of its existence. Silly Orthodox--spend all their time getting to know God and forget to write about the cosmic particulars of how it happens. ;)

Anyway, getting down to business. David asks, "What is the teleological cause of our salvation? As he predicted, I say that God desires to save all men, and thus calls all men and engraces all men. All this is supported in Scripture.

What about us, then? He rightly asks why some repent and others don't, and claims that it must be because God created some men to repent and some not to do so, which statement essentially contradicts the previous statement that He desires to save all and thus calls and engraces all.

I, of course, deny that. God desires to save all. Thus all are created with the potential to be saved. All are given grace.

So why are some not saved?

Let's go back to TULIP briefly and lay some groundwork. I deny your Total Depravity. Its place in my schema is taken by Man's Self-Annihilationist Proclivity. (wordy, I know, but it says what I need it to say) This is the result of the Fall. Man chose to put himself first, cut himself off from God, and in the course of pursuing his own desires and appetites progressively destroys the image of God in him and thus, ultimately, himself.

I uphold your Unconditional Election, but make it universal. God wills that all be saved, and calls all men to salvation. And he asks nothing of them in return for this gift, nothing can earn it, nothing can merit it. As you say, God's decision to save a man is Unconditional.

I categorically and vehemently deny your Limited Atonement, by far the most repugnant and unscriptural tenet of Calvinism. I replace it with Universal Atonement. Christ loves all men, He became fully man, and He died for the sins of all men.

I deny your Irresistible Grace. I replace it with the Infinite Love of God. Men can resist and refuse the gift of God, but He will never cease to love and call them. I hold to the doctrine that hellfire is the love of God as felt by those who reject it, not a juridical punishment.

Perseverance of the Saints I deny, in that men can and do leave the way of grace and continue to exercise the aforementioned Self-Annihilationist Proclivity. So I do not replace it, save by pointing to that first point and the fourth, the Infinite Love of God.

And no, I don't take it as a sign from God that those four points spell "SUUI," which is nothing meaningful that I'm aware of but sounds vaguely like what you call a pig. That's just a sign that I suck at constructing acronyms. ;)

So, in practice, what happens. God calls two men. One has not yet destroyed himself to the point of being unable or unwilling to hear and respond. He repents. The other has no desire to leave off pursuing his desires and gives the call not even a second thought. Note that the outward life of these two men could be completely deceptive--the first could be a murderer, the second an upstanding businessman in the community. It's a matter of the state of the heart.

Has the first done anything to merit his salvation? Not really--he simply has not managed to destroy himself before being plucked out. When God's call sounds in his heart, he still has the ability to respond with the tiniest little affirmative twitch of his heart towards God.

The other does not.

A bit of a tangent, here...for the record, man on his own is unable to repent. When God extends his grace, He also extends the spirit of repentence, the spirit, as I had phrased it before, of true desire. The man, again, is only able to accept or reject that gift. It is the smallest twitch of response and acceptance...rather, it is a tiny twitch of surrender. The man who responds to God's call responds by laying aside any action he can do to earn or merit it. He submits to his own humility.

Put another way, when God's grace comes, it shows a man how helpless he truly is, how mean and low a creature he is. If he can surrender his self-love enough to see this, then repentance is given and the Christian life begun. If not, the grace recedes--he drives God away.

Thus man truly does nothing to be saved. Even the man who responds with good works drives God's grace from him--in so doing he refuses the gift of repentance. The man who is saved sees himself as dust and admits it. He dies to himself. The man who drives grace from himself refuses to relinquish his life. As Christ said, "For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it" (Luke 9:24).

Am I making sense here? The man who is damned is the one who "does something" whether moral or immoral. The man who is saved is the one who "does nothing," who accepts the revelation that he is destitute, devoid of all worth and goodness.

So the one who is saved doesn't earn it. Ok?

Now, the one-time acceptance of the fact that we are destitute does not destroy the self-willed "Proclivity for Self-Annihilation" which masquerades as the Will for Self-Preservation. It pops up immediately the next time we see or smell or hear something we want. And we do something to save ourself and begin to forget that we simply can't.

Let this be said once and for all. The ascetic practices of the Orthodox tradition are simply and solely exercises to HELP THE CHRISTIAN BE PASSIVE AND ACCEPT THE FREE, UNDESERVED GRACE OF GOD. I know it is paradoxical. But observe. Those ascetical practices can be summarized as follows. Eat only what is absolutely necessary for biological life, drink only what is necessary for biological life, sleep only as much as is necessary for biological life, thank God for those necessities as though He had personally and directly given them to you, and spend all the rest of your time in thanks to God and supplication to Him for mercy upon you, a sinner undeserving of any regard. The goal is to mortify the self, to accustom yourself to deserving nothing, meriting nothing, and indeed thanking God for ALL THINGS which you have, earn or receive, as though they were a gift from Him which you did not deserve. Because you didn't. And you know it. The ascetical life is God's gift of repentance put into practice. And, at the same time, it is the only way to keep it--not that by living in that way you earn it or deserve it, but rather that only by living in that way do you NOT DRIVE IT AWAY FROM YOURSELF.

Any other sort of ascesis is of the devil, end of story. Also end of tangent.

Where were we? Oh, right. God calls, we respond only slightly--if we admit our sins and failings, repentance enters in and the Christian life begins. If not, grace departs--God called, we ignored Him, end of story.

Except it's not. God calls us again. Events in our lives transpire such that perhaps the next time he calls, we have lost something or someone dear, have suffered, feel lost or empty, and are more willing to admit the truth. Or perhaps not.

So He calls again. And again. Until we respond.

We know that God's Love is infinite. We know that He desires all men to be saved. We know (or I assert) that if anyone is not saved, it is because he insists on continuing to preserve his life, his honour, his integrity, his needs, etc. Hell for such a man is simply his perspective of God's all-in-all-ness. But God still loves Him--indeed, God's love for him may very well be the worst thing about his existence at that point.

But Scripture gives us reason to hope that even that man in the depths of hell after the final judgement may somehow be saved. Certainly nothing like an assurance. At best, it is a veiled, confusing, contradictory hope. But it is there, and it must be there. To my mind, Christianity MUST retain the hope of universal salvation.

That is to say, we must retain the assurance that, God's love being infinite and eternal, He will continue to love sinful mankind even after the last judgement. It may well be that that point is the point of no return for an unrepentant man, that there will simply not be enough of a man left after that to respond. But the damnation will be done by the man himself, not by God. No one has depicted this better than C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce.

And yes, I know all the verses where God says, "Depart, ye cursed," etc. I can explain those away as a manner of speaking about their fate. As I believe in the physical resurrection, they will certainly have bodies, and will need to go somewhere, to a place prepared for them. But I must affirm that God still loves them, and thus that there is still, on His end at least, the potential for their redemption. Nothing in Scripture rules that out, and everything in Scripture demands that I hold God's Love to be infinite.

To those on the other side who ask how I can accept a God who could allow such a thing, I say that I can fairly easily accept a God who would subject His creation to the POTENTIAL for vanity in hope that said potential be turned to loving Him (paraphrase/interpretation of Romans 8:20), even if it could be and would (and He knew it) in so many cases be turned instead to suffering and death and self-annihilation. It's the God who would create His creation in His image but fate those creatures in His image to damnation without any potential for salvation that I can't accept.

Getting back to topic. David concluded his post thusly:

And so we can see why the Calvinist charges the non-Calvinist with not properly understanding our dependence upon God. For, the non-Calvinist has established a condition for salvation that does not depend upon God--and hence the non-Calvinist cannot depend upon God for the meeting of that condition.

I think I have dealt with this. The "condition" for salvation on man's part is an acceptance of his dependence upon God. God responds to this acceptance with the gift of repentance. And it seems fairly ludicrous to me to say that the necessity of an acceptance of one's dependence upon God denotes a lack of dependence upon God. What say you, David? :)

I think I'm done now. Somewhere in all this rambling are (I think/hope) the systematic points requested. I have one parting shot, at what I consider to be the Achilles Heel of Calvinism.

Did God predestine the Fall? If not, how did it happen? And if you don't respond to any other part of this post, please respond to this. I can see how Calvinism holds up logically, etc everywhere else, but this question stumps me every time I try to put myself in a pair of Calvinistic shoes. Every time, I feel the hole behind my heel. And it gets really chilly in those shoes. ;)

Please pass on my congratulations to Michael and his bride. And give everyone else there my greetings, if you get the chance. Travel safe, etc. And God bless.