Shock horror! I discover I'm an Arminian!

Scot McKnight has been running a very enlightening series of posts on Arminianism and Calvinism. As he has done so I have realised that I have never really thought about what Arminianism really and actually teaches. Instead I have been innoculated from it by the prejudice against it in the Reformed circles of my Christian nurture and the belief that certain perspectives belong to the Augustinian/Calvinist end of things but not the Arminian. Now I am also aware that I have things against the Calvinist approach, for example;

if God chooses some to be reprobate (double predestination/elective sense), then God’s gracious love and justice are threatened.

But it never really occured to me that some of the things I still felt were correctish were actually part of Arminianism.

Arminians believe God knows what humans will do and predestination is rooted in, or related to, that foreknowledge. Election, for the Arminian, is corporate: God chooses Christ; all in Christ are chosen.

I think that is more or less where I find myself. Anyhow, that's only a smidgeon of the whole thing. I just keep reading stuff and thinking that I have far more Arminian thoughts than I ever realised... And it's doubly a shock because I had thought I was more theologically literate than this and because I have uncovered a piece of intellectual prejudice in myself that I thought was not there or likely to be there. It's just amazing to me how deeply and hiddenly embedded was the Calvinist streak, mainly because I thought that I was 'over' it.

Technorati Tags: Calvinism, Arminianism, Christian, foreknowledge, predestination