It's time for the Soterology 101 podcast, where God is most glorified by his love and provision for all people.

Welcome your host, the director of apologetics for Texas Baptists, an adjunct professor of theology, and a local teaching pastor, Dr. Layton Flowers.

Welcome to Sotriology 101. Today we're going to talk about

theological fatalism. Oftentimes, fatalism is something that's accused towards or an accusation

brought against Calvinistic believers. Of course, they as compatibilists deny fatalism, and the reason

they hold to compatibilism is to try to

avoid the charge of being theological fatalists. And the debate has always been between

compatibilist and incompatibilist or those who would hold to a more libertarian freedom of the will

is ultimately to say, can you escape your fatalistic tendencies by holding to certain premise,

a certain premise that you, that you, that you formulated within your theological worldview.

And if your worldview is holding to a form of hard determinism that God has brought to pass all things

for his glory, that all things are unchangeably decreed by and

brought to pass by God for his greatest glory, can you escape the charge of theological fatalism?

So before we play a clip from John Piper, who's asked the question about how do you avoid fatalism,

I want to give you a direct definition. This is from Stanford Encyclopedia

of Philosophy, so a credible source here. It's defining the concept of theological fatalism. It says

fatalism is a thesis that human acts occur by necessity. The word necessity, in matter of fact,

if you read early church fathers, they use, instead of using the

word determination or determined or predestined, they use the word of necessity. Necessity is another

word for determined. It's done by necessity. It's done by determination of someone else. And so I'm not

doing what I'm doing by my own free action, but by necessity. In other words, I could not do otherwise.

And this becomes kind of the changeout word within the philosophical worldview and even in

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