Well put, Acts2027. C.S. Lewis said a similar thing in "The Problem of Pain," but with a slightly more "Arminian" twist:<br><br>"It is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we perfer everything else to Him, and come to Hom because there is "nothing better" now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears whoch trouble high-mided readers of SCripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diiminuition." Those who would like the God od scripture to be ore purely ethical, do not know what they ask. If God.... would not have us till we came to Hom from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?"<br><br>I like the way Lewis puts it. I, for one, am a Calvinist- although I perfer to insert the word "moderate" in there. I find much of what goes on in the name of Calvinism is simply putting pat, if not un-Biblical, answers to questions that really are mysteries in the Bible- like the John 6 passage. (For another example, Romans 9 is just about the most "Calvinistic" passage in scripture, yet right after that, in 10:10-13, we have another open invitation.)<br><br>I cannot accept the "total depravity" expressed by some Puritans (there was a chapter on this in John Armstrong's "The Compromised Church.") i.e. humans are totally unable to even respond positively to God without His spirit. What about people who, for example, express an interest in God, begin reading the Bible, and then die in a car accident? Did God decide to play some cruel joke by bringing them part way, and then send them to Hell anyway? Salvation is a work of God, one who "stoops to conquer," who brings us to Himself rather than waiting for us to come for all the best motives, because we never could. But we must have a part- a small part, like Samson pushing on the pillars- but still a part. Otherwise Jesus was wasting His breath preaching the kingdom to the crowds that flocked around Him. Think of all those open invitations! Didn't he realise that most of those listening likely weren't part of the elect?<br><br>If we carry total human inability to it's furthest logical application, we end up with Hannah Wittal Smith and "The Christians's Secret for a Happy Life," in which she states that we, even after we are saved, can do absolutely nothing for God. Everything is completely His work; we do nothing becuase we can do nothing. She even states that the purpose of reading the Bible is not to learn and apply, etc., becuase we can't, but that reading the Bible is simply so that we can recognise what God is already doing in our lives so we can rejoice. Think about it! It's ludicrous, but it is what happends when you keep goind down the path of total human inability. Calvinism turns in to hyper-Calvinism quite quick, and soon we are stuck in vast reaches of theological quagmire.<br><br>Forgive my likely off-topic ramblings. Just trying to get some thoughts out!

(Latin phrase goes here.)