Arminian dualism

When I did my little post on the logical parallels between Arminianism and Manichean/Zoroastrian dualism, I clearly got under the skin of many thin-skinned Arminians.

What’s ironic about their indignant, overheated reaction is that I was simply playing the game by their own rules. I’m using their very own set-up.

When Arminians attack Calvinism on moralistic grounds, they frame the problem of evil in terms of authorship. Calvinism allegedly makes God the “author of sin.”

So authorship is their paradigm. And, given that paradigm, they reject unitary authorship. God is not the only author of the story.

If, therefore, we play along with their favorite metaphor, then the story (i.e. the world) was coauthored by a virtuous novelist or playwright in conjunction with a wicked novelist or playwright. The virtuous author authored the good stuff while the fiendish author authored the bad stuff. God is the author of all the good stuff, while someone else authored all the bad stuff.

Well, isn’t that bedrock dualism? Arminians bifurcate the story into good and evil, assigning the heroes to one author while they assign the villains to another author. An honorable author authors honorable characters while a dishonorable author authors dishonorable characters.

It’s like saying Sir Arthur Conan Doyle authored the noble character of Sherlock Holmes, but someone else authored the ignoble character of Prof. Moriarty.

I suppose they would tweak the metaphor a bit in terms of composite authorship rather than coauthorship. Different authors wrote different parts of the story.

But the underlying principle remains dualistic. Good has one source while evil has a different source. Two antithetical, opposing sources.