I try to avoid engagement with Leighton Flowers these days, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. If you don’t know he is a functional semi-Pelagian and popular YouTuber. He typically argues with 5-point Calvinists. I am, of course, not of the classical Calvinist tribe, indeed I’ve been their critic for decades. But in certain ways LF, in my view, is offering an even greater maleficence when it comes to his belief that human beings, by nature, simply have the capacity to respond to God’s offer of salvation with no internal and unilateral intervention by God. It is this type of context I picked up a debate LF was having with a popular 5 point Calvinist on Twitter. I decided to give him a piece of my theological mind from the direction I think from as an Athanasian Reformed. Here is the Tweet from him I am responding to. It has to do with his idiosyncratic idea that someone who is “regenerate” is a “better man” than someone who is not. Even that itself is rife with theological error, but I responded in a broader way as you’ll see. Anyway, here is that tweet: 

And here is how I responded to LF: 

This is a sleight of hand, L. You are equivocating by conflating a soteriological position (before God) with an anthropological reality (the condition of humanity prior to God’s radical redemption/recreation). In order for the impossible to become possible required a totally new grounding for humanity before God. It required that God in Christ first re-conciled humanity with God by creating a new status/condition before God such that humanity could look away from themselves and finally to God. ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ ‘By His poverty we’ve been made rich.’ In Pauline theology these are made in creational/recreational motifs, with the focus being on Christ as the firstborn from the dead for us. IOW, these are ontological and ontic categories both. God did for us in Christ’s vicarious humanity what we would never do left to ourselves, since we love the darkness rather than the Light. you think from what the theologians call actus purus ‘pure nature.’ It is the ground that the semi-Pelagians have thought from for centuries. You think of grace in substance and qualitative terms rather than in personal terms as those are revealed in Christ. This isn’t even a matter of affirming the classical doctrine of original sin, per se. It is simply the point that at the lapse the world, humanity as the pinnacle, was thrust into a world, ontologically (meaning in relation to God) that was ruptured from God’s life. this rupture set the ontic conditions for humans such that they were by nature turned in on themselves, only able to choose the darkness because they loved the darkness rather than the Light / only able to worship nature and make God into their image because they were no longer participants with God in Christ. This is an ontological not forensic status; a status that penetrates into the depths of what it means to be human coram Deo; a status that makes humans sub-human insofar that they are disconnected from the original telos of their lives, which is to be in fellowship with the ground of their lives in God in Jesus Christ. That is an ontological frame with ontic implications, and ones that you ceaselessly fail to recognize in these discussions. According to the Apostle Paul it is only as we are re-created in the imago Christi (image of Christ) who in fact is the imago Dei for us (Col 1.15), that a person comes to have the impossible made possible by coming to have capacity to say Yes to God from God’s Yes and Amen for them in [the] vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This discussion goes much deeper than you allow yourself to imagine. You need to move beyond this constant binary of Calvinism V Provisionism, and learn to reason theologically for once. 

The irony of all of this is that the classical Calvinists operate with and from the same juridical categories about God, and thus salvation, that LF is operating from (which I have established elsewhere). The double-irony is that LF doesn’t recognize even this. He hasn’t removed himself from the Aristotelian Christianity that Calvinism, in general, is; instead, he has just moved the furniture around to his liking. He is still Augustinian insofar as he argues on Augustine’s terms; that is when he refers to predestination, election, and even his semi-Pelagian anthropology. Such anthropology, the sort LF operates with, was formed in the caldron of the semi-Pelagians and the soteriological terms and categories set by Augustine et al. LF, will never grasp how this is the case, which is why I typically demur from these sorts of engagements with him.