William Tyndale Quotes

The Arminian view makes the final decision of our salvation rest upon a human choice, not upon a divine action.

To suggest that the merciful, longsuffering, gracious and loving God of the Bible would invent a dreadful doctrine like Calvinism, which would have us believe it is an act of 'grace' to select only certain people for heaven and, by exclusion, others for hell, comes perilously close to blasphemy.

If any man doth ascribe of salvation, even the very least, to the free will of man, he knoweth nothing of grace, and he hath not learnt Jesus Christ aright.

He [God] made us free, and He respects that. It is two different spheres of causality. Interdependent, though. It is not two boxes looking at one another without any kind of direct connections. There are very direct connections. That's why the question of "how are we free if God is omnipotent?" is a real, constant question. Ultimately, God is all powerful, and yet we are free.

For the Arminian, salvation is possible for all but certain for none. In the Calvinist position, salvation is sure for God's elect.

In every system of theology, therefore, there is a chapter De libero arbitrio. This is a question which every theologian finds in his path, and which he must dispose of; and on the manner in which it is determined depends his theology, and of course his religion, so far as his theology is to him a truth and reality

The fact that God knows everything does not mean that He is directly causing everything. He respects our freedom at our level. He makes it possible for us to act freely. If He didn't, we wouldn't act at all - we wouldn't be at all.

I believe that nothing happens apart from divine determination and decree. We shall never be able to escape from the doctrine of divine predestination - the doctrine that God has foreordained certain people unto eternal life.

I think what Calvinism may offer us is that God's in charge of his world.

The doctrine of free will is always in danger of robbing God of his honor

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

Satan does not care whether he drags you down to hell as a Calvinist or as an Arminian, so long as he can get you there.

Free-will doctrine-what does it? It magnifies man into God. It declares God's purposes a nullity, since they cannot be carried out unless men are willing. It makes God's will a waiting servant to the will of man, and the whole covenant of grace dependent on human action. Denying election on the ground of injustice, it holds God to be a debtor to sinners.

All the passages in the Holy Scriptures that mention assistance are they that do away with "free-will", and these are countless...For grace is needed, and the help of grace is given, because "free-will" can do nothing.

Man is nothing; he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him" and "you dishonour God by denying election. You plainly make salvation depend, not on God's 'free grace' but on Man's 'free will.'

Grace is necessary to salvation, free will equally so - but grace in order to give salvation, free will in order to receive it.

The faults of which we ask you [God] the remittance, it is you who make us commit them; the traps of which we implore you to deliver us, it is you who has set them for us; and the Satan which surrounds us, this Satan, it is you.

Arminianism is 'natural' in one sense, in that it represents a characteristic perversion of Biblical teaching by the fallen mind of man.

From the Word of God I gather that damnation is all of man, from top to bottom, and salvation is all of grace, from first to last. He that perishes chooses to perish; but he that is saved is saved because God has chosen to save him.

PREDESTINATION, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. . . . not be confused with that of foreordination. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore.

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

The Bible puts forth a strong case for no free will and that's a real problem you know, because the justification for supposedly being punished after death is that you had free will. If you didn't have free will and you did what God predetermined, then how can he punish you?"

I believe that very much of current Arminianism is simply ignorance of gospel doctrine; and if people began to study their Bibles, and to take the Word of God as they find it, they must inevitably, if believers, rise up to rejoice in the doctrines of grace.

A natural man hath no such thing as free-will at all, if you take it for a power of doing that which is good and well-pleasing unto God in things spiritual.

There are two great truths which from this platform I have proclaimed for many years. The first is that salvation is free to every man who will have it; the second is that God gives salvation to a people whom He has chosen; and these truths are not in conflict with each other in the least degree.