Reformed Theology?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNe9n5me8sg

This video gives a good representation of at least some arguments for Calvinism and reformed thought. Two arguments common to this video, among many others will be dealt with below.

The first is given by Charles Spurgeon, who essentially argues that if we freely chose to be saved we would have something to boast about. We would have contributed something to our salvation. Now the traditional Arminian response, to my knowledge, has been that God gives us grace to choose. We cannot boast in our choosing God because God gave us that ability in the first place. But Spurgeon seems to attempt to respond to this by saying that if that is true, why is it that you responded positively to God’s calling but others did not? Something must have been better in you for you to choose God while others chose death. I am not convinced by this response however. If Arminians are right and God has given us the ability to choose Him or choose death as a part of His common grace, then it seems that it is not something in us that chooses God, but the grace in us that has allowed us to. Thus we are not better than someone who has failed to respond to God’s calling, as that choice was allotted to them by God as well. On top of this, making a choice as complex as choosing what to commit our lives to can hardly be a matter of boasting. When it comes to the intellect, a man may choose to be an atheist and be perfectly rational in doing so because the information, as he sees it, seems to be best explained by atheism. I could not boast, therefore that I am of a superior intellect than the atheist simply because it turned out that God exists and I, as a theist, was correct in my belief. Thus it seems that reformed theologians oversimplify the issue and straw man the Arminian position.

This leads me to a second argument, closely related to the first that if God had given us grace to freely choose Him or not, His grace would be ineffectual. This is put in the way that if God died for everyone’s sins, the fact that not everyone is saved is proof that Christ failed. This is a case of simple equivocation. To claim that God gave us grace to freely choose to accept Him as our savior, or not, does not require us to believe that God died for everyone’s sins in a strictly penal substitutionary manner. It could simply be that, as Mark Driscoll (among other theologians) argues, Christ died as a sacrifice that was sufficient for all, but effectual only for some and that Christ’s death allotted common grace for everyone to be able to choose to follow Him, or not. Thus this argument holds no water.

You’ll note from the second half of the vid, that John Piper repeatedly states that our fallen state requires God to force a change in us that immediately makes us changed. He puts as it took Christ dying on the cross to give us irresistible grace to save us. Ironically, this seems to fly in the face of Calvinists emphasis on God’s sovereignty, is Piper suggesting that God is incapable of making His grace resistible or giving us grace that allows us to choose between Him and death? If so, does this not put a severe restriction on God’s power and Lordship?