Mr. Hamilton discusses whether a believer can accidentally commit the unpardonable sin.
Please click on the attachment to view "Can a Person Accidentally Commit the Unpardonable Sin?"

Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. -Hebrews 10:22-23

Let's take a look at some of the different views on the possibility of losing salvation. Before looking at each view it helpful to note how we answer the following two questions:

1) How is Salvation "gained"? By works, by faith, or by decree?
2) How is Salvation "kept"?, By works, by faith, or by decree?

I'm going to propose 5 common views, that come about through the way we answer these two questions.

A major gun in the Calvinist arsenal against Arminianism is the issue of assurance of salvation. Calvinists relish pointing out that an Arminian never has assurance of his salvation. In contrast, they say, Calvinists are absolutely assured of their salvation since God has foreordained it from the deep dark, inscrutible counsels of God.

However, in this post, I would like to claim that Calvinists really have no assurance at all of their salvation.

If Dr. Keith Stanglin's book, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation, isn't the best book out there on Arminius, it’s certainly in the top five. Stanglin's description of Arminius' views has a historic flare, similar to books like God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of James Arminius by Richard Muller, or Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation by Carl Bangs.

Stanglin's book has several unique features. First, it uses some of the 35 untranslated, unpublished Public Disputations by Arminius. Second, it examines Arminius' fellow professors at Leiden and the teaching styles and methods common at the university. Third, Stanglin retranslates Arminius from Latin, making some important corrections to Nichols' translation. This focus on primary materials, original language and context sets the stage for clearly understanding what Arminius had to say about assurance.

In this post I give my autobiographical and intellectual reasons for rejecting Calvinism

This is a post I have been thinking about and working on for quite some time. It is not meant to be an exhaustive critique of Calvinism or an argument for the purity of non-Calvinist theology. It is a response to the genuine inquiries of those who ask why I no longer hold to the Calvinistic “doctrines of grace” and “sovereignty of God.” Confessional intellectual autobiography and polemical discourse are the genres in which I write, and hopefully it will be apparent at which places I vacillate between the two. I have made a concerted effort to downplay the use of technical jargon, though some will be necessary. When words idiosyncratic to the issues emerge I will do my best to explain them, but I plead for grace in advance for any presumed vocabulary that may be foreign to the gentle reader.