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Title: Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will
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Manufacturer: Baker Publishing Group (MI)
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| Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will by Baker Publishing Group (MI) Ammunition against your local Arminian | | Sproul in his usual philosophical approach, compares and contrasts the various Arminian, Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, and Calvinist views on soteriology and sanctification. A very concise and easy to understand presentation, though obviously he is rooting for the Calvinist side from the get-go. Still, it provides the reader with a solid historical basis for evaluating the ongoing arguments concerning the role of man's free will in a sovereign God's universe. | | Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will by Baker Publishing Group (MI) Excellent Book...! | This is by far the best work so far by this great author Dr. Sproul...(just as the Bondage of the Will was Luther's greatest work).
Be sure to read this one! The chapters on Luther and Calvin alone are worth the entire book! | | Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will by Baker Publishing Group (MI) Willing To Believe R.C. Sproul? | As an historical sketch of the age old theological debate, this was an exciting read for me when I began studying this subject. I have since earned an M.A. in Theological Studies and decided to read it again to see what I've learned. One thing is that, the controversy is not as important as it used to be. Second, I appreciate that Sproul provides prime source texts (from the historical figures themselves). There are so many actual quotes, and not only a couple lines spattered here or there but entire paragraphs from Turretin, Calvin, Luther, Finney, etc., it can almost be titled a reader. Thirdly, I appreciate the logic of Sproul's position and his professionalism. Calvinism is a very formative and logical system. It is utterly cohesive. Nietzsche understood this to be the same as he said (literally) that Christianity is a system, a whole of things; and when you pull a main concept out of it, nothing necessary remains. You will appreciate some of that when you read through Willing to Believe.
This book is still good after so many years and one thing that I see that I enjoy now more than before is that you don't have to dig through to Turretin or Luther or Pelagius to get a good sense of what they believed concerning this subject. | | Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will by Baker Publishing Group (MI) Unbelievable | Unbelievable:
This book was hard to stomach. I'm use to reading Protestant apologetic nonsense from those who don't claim to be theologians, but Willing to Believe is marketed as "a major work" by a guy who purports to be a "professional theologian," and yet the book is so filled with fiction that you really need to be ignorant of Christian theology to take it seriously. Someone gave Dr. Sproul a Ph.D; one would think he would at least attempt to be professional. Trying to align St. Augustine with Luther and Calvin, Dr. Sproul not only seriously distorts the teachings of the saint, but also the teachings of the Reformers. Anyone who has actually read St. Augustine, Luther, and Calvin knows that the Reformers were as far from St. Augustine as were Pelagius and Nestorius. Sadly, Dr. Sproul, Luther, and Calvin all seem to have missed St. Augustine's words in the Enchiridion; "Whosoever, therefore, says that to be a man is evil (the Reformed doctrine of man's total depravity), or that to be wicked is good (the Reformed doctrine that after justification man remains evil, as well as the Reformed doctrine of predestination to Hell prior to foreseen demerits), comes under that prophetic condemnation: Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil. For such a man finds fault with the works of God, that is, with man, and he praises the defect of man which is iniquity. Every being therefore, even though it be imperfect, is good so far as it is a being; so far as it is defective, it is evil" (Enchiridion 4.13). As regards St. Augustine's stance on the ability of man to cooperate with justifying grace, Dr. Sproul insists he denied it absolutely. Apparently he never read St. Augustine's sermon 11; "He who created you without your cooperation does not justify you without your cooperation. He who created you without you knowing, will not justify you without you knowing" (Sermon 11.13). As Dr. Sproul rightly points out, God creates the free act of the good within us. But our will is not passive as he insists. Such a view necessarily implies double predestination and the doctrine that God creates men for the sole purpose of evil, with Hell as their end - thus making God the author of evil. Dr. Sproul tries valiantly to wriggle out of this, but he cannot escape logic without lying. That is why he is forced into distorting the teachings of not only the Reformers, but of St. Augustine and the Catholic Church which has always insisted that God creates the free act of good within man, but in such a way that man's free will is not violated. Even man's ability and willingness to cooperate with God's grace is caused by God. Furthermore, even though God moves man to freely choose the good, he moves man to choose the good infallibly because due to his omniscience God is able to present to man the very grace God knows the man will not resist, even though the ability to do so remains within him. Dr. Sproul refuses to acknowledge that what the Council of Orange condemned in semi-Pelagianism was not man's ability to cooperate with God's grace, but man's ability to make a first movement toward God without God's special grace. When Dr. Sproul teaches that man is unable to cooperate with God in his justification, he makes God the author of evil and is teaching heresy, pure and simple. Anyone reading this book to get a better idea of the Christian doctrine of free-will and justification should beware that Dr. Sproul is not presenting anywhere near a true picture of the history.
Finally, Dr. Sproul presents the arguments of various Protestant theologians through the last four centuries attempting to show whether they conform to the doctrine of the Reformers. The depth of confusion and disagreement among Protestantism renews in me a thankful praise for the guidance of the Holy Spirit offered to the Catholic Church "until the end of the age."
| | Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will by Baker Publishing Group (MI) Disappointing! | This book was a great disappointment to me. It falls so short of scholarly heights that it might as well have been written by a graduate student. Instead of setting forward a strong interpretation of ideas and of documents, Sproul merely lists theological views, mixing them with long quotations from very antiquated sources (i.e., page after page from Schaff Herzog Encyclopedia!!!). His work is not up to date, insofar as he does not refer to any contemporary work on the subject; it lacks a critical approach (to him anything that does not reflect Reformed theology is either bad or inadequate); and finally, it fails to reach a conclusion and to break any new ground whatsoever. In other words this book was a waste of my time. Having written a book on the subject myself, I seriously question his grasp of the Semi-pelagian controversy (in my view it was not about monergism or synergism in the work of regeneration, but about the chronological and hierarchical priority of grace over free will and about predestination). The following are the views discussed in his book:
-We are capable of obedience (Pelagius). No mention of Augustine's works; no reference to an up to date bibliography on Pelagius either.
-We are incapable of obedience (Augustine). No serious review of Augustine's main works on the topic of grace and free will.
-We are capable of cooperating (semi-Pelagianism). Cassian was not the abbot of Massilia (p.70); semi-Pelagians' main contention was NOT synergism (p.73). Trent and the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church follow semi-pelagianism because they talk about our cooperari. What book "on grace and freedom" did Prosper write in 432? What is Sproul talking about?
-We are in bondage to sin (Luther)
-We are voluntary slaves (Calvin)
-We are free to believe (Arminius)
-We are inclined to sin (Edwards)
-We are not depraved by nature (Charles Finney)
-We are able to believe (Lewis Chafer)
| | Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will by Baker Publishing Group (MI) Product Description | | What is the role of the will in believing the good news of the gospel? Why is there so much controversy over free will throughout church history? R. C. Sproul finds that Christians have often been influenced by pagan views of the human will that deny the effects of Adam's fall. In Willing to Believe, Sproul traces the free-will controversy from its formal beginning in the fifth century, with the writings of Augustine and Pelagius, to the present. Readers will gain understanding into the nuances separating the views of Protestants and Catholics, Calvinists and Arminians, and Reformed and Dispensationalists. This book, like Sproul's Faith Alone, is a major work on an essential evangelical tenet. |
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