The name calling and labeling is a way of responding to, without actually answering, an objection. The charge of running contrary to the gospel is more of the same.
I can find no scripture telling me that I am born with a "sin nature". Just long explanations of such, like the one I am responding to. The bible says that man is corruptible (Rom 1:23). So it is not that we have a "sin nature", our nature is that we are corruptible, and become corrupted, by sin. Adam was not in the garden corrupted, he was there corruptible, became corrupted, and "died".
Wow. I guess my labeling wasn't far off the mark. If you look up Romans 1:23 in a lexicon, you will find that the word corruptible does not mean what you believe it means. ἀφθάρτου "
862a: undecaying, i.e. imperishable" for God, and φθαρτοῦ "perishable, corruptible". It is not speaking about whether we are sinners or not, but that God is basically immortal, and we are mortal. (Hence some bible translations using the words immortal and mortal, instead of incorruptible and corruptible.) As far as Adam's true condition in the garden, we cannot know. If he didn't sin, would he have died at 1000 years of age? Would he die at all? If not, then he was incorruptible. That doesn't give him the rest of the characteristics of God, it just means that he too was immortal. (though not eternal like God, because Adam had a beginning.) There are A LOT of verses that speak against you. If we our corruptible, but start incorruptible, how is it that we die, as death is the mark of sin?
Romans 7:20 "But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me." Shin which "dwells" in me? Sounds like a sin nature. Also, I John says that if anyone says they are without sin, they are liars. David said that he was conceived in sin.
Romans 6:6 "knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin;" Just what is "our old self"? I know that self is basically my nature, my consciousness. What is this "body of sin"? Paul spoke of it as something chained to him that he drags around with him, that is rotting his flesh. Who will free me from this body of death? It is our old nature, our sin nature. That nature which is replaced by the Holy Spirit at salvation.
Psalms 58:3 "The wicked are estranged from the womb; These who speak lies go astray from birth."
In the parable of the coin, it was not in the woman's possession prior to being a coin, it was always a coin. Same with the prodigal son. If the woman is Christ, there is clearly a time (after being born) that a person is His, before being lost. In His possession corruptible, before being lost to corruption.
The prodigal son was not always... prodigal. Now I think it is hilarious that you believe God was born. (Christ is God, so... what you said makes no sense.) Ephesians 1 states that we were (the elect, that is, believers) adopted as children of God through Christ before the foundation of the world. If we make that temporal, then, before the foundation of the world, the elect were not yet lost. They then became lost, but just because that happened didn't make them less then God's adopted children. God then redeemed His lost possession, His children, through Christ through whom they were adopted in the first place, and gave them the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of the inheritance they have in the Kingdom as adopted children, until they take possession of said inheritance.
Absent any biblical proof, no.
So, given Ephesians 1... (a passage everyone seems to ignore)
No, adoption is linked with receiving the Spirit (Rom 8:15). Without the Spirit you are none of His (Rom 8:9).
Ephesians 1:4-5 "4 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,"
Abraham never had the Holy Spirit, so does that mean he was never actually beloved of God? I mean, as you say, "Without the Spirit you are none of His."
But you said earlier that the his father (representing God) had to intervene first. Where does that intervention happen in this parable?
When he woke up. There is no way to know why he woke up to his condition. We do know he was in that condition for some time. We do have a very showy, a very visible example of God's intervention when He killed Saul on the road to Damascus. It was such a horrible accident, only Paul survived. What did God tell Ananias about Paul? HE CHOSE HIM. Paul did not choose God. Even this ONE example contradicts what you believe because it wasn't some kind of exception. He went above and beyond in making it clear that His enemy was no longer His enemy, and that HE personally made it so.
The "wake up call" was his living conditions, and hunger.
Luke 15 "13 `And not many days after, having gathered all together, the younger son went abroad to a far country, and there he scattered his substance, living riotously;
14 and he having spent all, there came a mighty famine on that country, and himself began to be in want;
15 and having gone on, he joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him to the fields to feed swine,
16 and he was desirous to fill his belly from the husks that the swine were eating, and no one was giving to him."
"17 `And having come to himself, he said, How many hirelings of my father have a superabundance of bread, and I here with hunger am perishing!"
The wake up call is clear here "And having come to himself". That is all you need to see. Something caused him to come to his senses. Something brought home to mind. (If you have never been in a downward spiral that feeds on itself, you may not understand just how much meaning is in those words "and having come to himself." Some have, and some understand exactly what this means.
His father never needed to intervene as your doctrine teaches, so much of what you have to say is being read into the text. The bottom line is that Jesus promised that those who come to Him will never hunger (or thirst, John 6:35). In the text of the prodigal son, this plays out. The son hungered, came, and was fed.
We don't know if there was an intervention, or not. We don't know what broke him out of his self-feeding downward spiral. Yet something pulled him out of it and "he came to himself". (That is, he came to his senses.) He went from the downward spiral that is self-perpetuating, and suddenly was rational again. His conditions did not bring him to his senses, they fed the downward spiral he was in.
The point I am focusing on is that BEFORE he left, the son was also with his father, and well fed.
Which is fine when lined up with Ephesians 1. The elect went from adopted children, to sin bound adopted children, to redeemed adopted children.
This is more of you spinning the text to reflect your doctrine. The prodigal son is already living and breathing, eating in his fathers house. The coin is already shaped and imprinted, not just a shapeless piece of silver or gold. Even Adam, as I said earlier, was in the garden walking with God before he was corrupted. Your doctrine does not have an answer for this.
I don't need to spin it. You need to look into words. Adam was not incorruptible. He was always corruptible. However, this did not come into focus until after he sinned, and Adam became truly MORTAL. Look into the meaning of the words. No doctrine has an answer to what Adam's condition truly was before the fall, as to how it would have continued if there was no fall. NO ONE KNOWS. So, unless your name is No One, then you don't know either.
Understood. I am simply speaking to those places you allude to, the vast richness of scripture calvinism misses the mark on. And I only call out calvinism because this is the forum which bears its name, and thats what you identify as, but I speak more in terms of biblical truths in general. I think original sin and td is believed in both A and C.
I don't identify as a calvinist. Did you know that I believe things that Calvinists in general HATE? To me, Calvinism is just a view of soteriology that happens to closely align to my own. There is original sin (Paul said so), and there is total depravity (God said so). For by one man did sin enter the world, and through sin death. If sin entered the world through one man, then there was an original sin. If we also die, then we are connected to that original sin by death. Original sin is not so much a calvinist belief, as it is a reformed belief that is found in calvinism as well.