It looks like at least one particular Baptist has put his finger on the real issue at stake in the dispute between Arminianism and Calvinism: the denial of the doctrine of the bondage of the will, a key doctrine of the Protestant Reformation and the Holy Scriptures.
In the denial section of article two, the authors write,
We deny that Adam’s sin resulted in the incapacitation of any person’s free will or rendered any person guilty before he has personally sinned.The assertion about free will is controversial, but in my opinion the statement about guilt that appears at the end of this sentence is more troubling, for it appears to be nothing less than a denial of what Scripture teaches about the doctrine of original sin. The authors of this statement (and those who have signed it) assert that Adamic guilt is not imputed to Adam’s descendants. This is quite a remarkable claim. In the absence of qualification, even Arminius would likely have objected to this assertion. The authors apparently believe that sinners are only guilty for the actual sins which they commit. The net result of this is that humans are not born guilty and liable to condemnation but rather only become such when they actually sin.
--John Aloisi
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And yet Pighius, by a senseless cavil, as by a hog's snout, tries to root up these words of the apostle with all their positive plainness of meaning. He replies that the election of grace here means that Jacob had merited no such thing beforehand. But since the apostle commends this electing grace of God on the very ground that while the one was elected, the other was rejected, the vain fiction of Pighius concerning universal grace falls to the ground at once. . . .
Calvin's Calvinism, Section I
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