Talk:General Baptists

[Untitled]

This statement betrays some basic misunderstanding of both Calvinism and Arminianism: "Today (2008), the majority of English and American Baptist churches hold a moderately Calvinistic outlook, combining the general atonement whosoever will view of the General Baptists, with the eternal security view of the Regular/Particular Baptists."

If a Baptist church believes that Jesus died for everyone, and if that same church rejects the notion that God predestines some people to believe, then that church is Arminian and can hardly be called Calvinistic. True, most Baptist churches believe in "eternal security," but this is not the determining factor of what makes them Arminian or Calvinistic. Arminius himself and the Arminian Remonstrants made explicit statements that the issue of eternal security remained unsettled for them. Indeed, a person can believe in eternal security and belong to the Society of Evangelical Arminians.

This being the case, General Baptist theology has overwhelmingly dominated Baptist churches both in the U.S. and the U.K. Most Baptists have a theology exactly as that outlined in the Society of Evangelical Arminians' Statement of Faith: http://evangelicalarminians.org/sof

Forlinianslip (talk) 07:42, 23 May 2009 (UTC)