Yet Another Early Church NON-CALVINIST - Athenagoras (AD 177)

The funny thing about reading the Early Church Fathers is NO ONE remains a Calvinist after reading them honestly. Yes, Calvinist apologists will "cherry-pick" quotes from their writings, but if anyone were to read ALL of that writer, they will either have to hereticize them all as some kind of proto-semi-Pelagians and/or Pelagians or acknowledge that they were corrupted by Augustine and the Protestant Reformers. 

I could literally do this all day, every day with hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of quotes from nearly every Church Father before Augustine (and after him especially amongst the Greek Fathers). There is simply NO Augustinian or Calvinist reading of the following quote from Athenagoras in the 2nd Century - he did NOT affirm the Calvinist/Reformed notion or understanding of total depravity (meaning 'total inability') or the bondage of the will. Those concepts were imported by Augustine from Gnostic Manichaeism, and pagan philosophy (Stoicism and neo-Platonism). 

"Just as with men, who have freedom of choice as to both virtue and vice (for you would not either honour the good or punish the bad, unless vice and virtue were in their own power; and some are diligent in the matters entrusted to them by you, and others faithless), so is it among the angels. Some, free agents, you will observe, such as they were created by God, continued in those things for which God had made and over which He had ordained them; but some outraged both the constitution of their nature and the government entrusted to them: namely, this ruler of matter and its various forms, and others of those who were placed about this first firmament (you know that we say nothing without witnesses, but state the things which have been declared by the prophets); these fell into impure love of virgins, and were subjugated by the flesh, and he became negligent and wicked in the management of the things entrusted to him. Of these lovers of virgins, therefore, were begotten those who are called giants. And if something has been said by the poets, too, about the giants, be not surprised at this: worldly wisdom and divine differ as much from each other as truth and plausibility: the one is of heaven and the other of earth; and indeed, according to the prince of matter" 

A Plea For the Christians, Chpt. 24 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0205.htm)

And like the rest of the Early Church, this quote also DESTROYS the so-called "Sethite View" of Genesis 6:1-4 which was also popularized by Augustine and infected the Reformers as well. 

Why not get free of both your Augustinian/Calvinist Deterministic ideas AND your non-Apostolic understanding of Genesis 6:1-4 at the same time?? You'll be glad you did!