Calvinists believe that no one has the capacity to choose God. One person used the analogy of major league baseball. You may want to be a major league baseball player, but the only way you become one is when a major league baseball team chooses to make you a player. You have no capacity to choose what is not yours to choose. So it is with salvation. We humans are not given the capacity to choose to become a child of the King. The King makes that choice. The King chooses whom he will adopt. You are not given the right or capacity to make that choice. Therefore, your will is not free to choose what is not given to you to choose.
Word games David. I will put my Calvinist hat on. God chose me. The calling is unconditional. The calling is irresistable. I dont choose God, He chooses me. Where is the "free will" there?
It's not word games. But you also need to define what you mean when you say free-will. Do you have the humanist view that we can choose anything at all even if it is against our nature and desire?
They are in total agreement on depravity. As Tom Cassidy pointed out to me, when you boil away all the word games and meaningless terms, the only real difference in true Classical Arminianism and Calvinism is point "i". There is really very little difference on point L when the same term definitions are adhered to.
Again, you are free to choose what you want. In our natural state we do not want righteousness, we do not want God, but if we are chosen, the spirit activates our faith and our desire is turned towards God so that our desire is God and we freely choose what we desire. Our eyes are opened.
Again, a word game. There is no free choice. A decision is made by Sovereign God. He decides Choice A. His election to choice A is unconditional. His force drawing you to A is irresistable. There is no choice B or C allowed.
You really contend you made a choice of your free will?
High Calvinists call the concept of free will, as it pertains to salvation, just what all Calvinists should call it if they quit playng word games; folly and non-existent.
A hyper Cal would say there is no free will at all.