Jefferson said:
mitchellmckain:
You'd enjoy
THIS.
Except for one thing - I am not a great fan of debate, for it presumes that things can be proven and that is not a presumption that I accept. Therefore I consider the attitude which attends discussion to be much more realistic.
godrulz said:
God does predestine some things, but not all things. Free will is genuine, not illusory.
An echo of my thoughts exactly!
godrulz said:
Total depravity does not mean total inability. Synergism, not monergism (God provides and initiates salvation, but man must subjectively appropriate His objective work).
Absolutely. But let me clarify my position on this. My rejection of total inability has more to do with the fact that I consider total depravity an inevitable quality of human beings rather than a universal quality of human beings. Sin is a disease in which we participate by our own individual choice, and therefore its progression varies considerably from person to person. And thus we are born innocent. BUT we were never intended from our creation to navigate the moral landscape without a personal relationship with God. Stumbling blind through this treacherous ground (especially surrounded by the misleading advice of the others who surround us) makes our fall an inescapable inevitability.
As a physicist I particularly like the following imagery: we are under the law of sin much like we are under the law of gravity. Due to circumstances for which we can take little credit, some of us may have a downward velocity and some of us may be moving upward, but the relentless downward acceleration of sin makes our ultimate destination one and the same unless we fall into the hands of God (and choose to remain in those hands).
godrulz said:
Omniscience means that God knows all that is knowable. He knows the past and present exhaustively. He cannot chose to not know possible objects of knowledge. The way His foreknowledge is limited is by creating a partially open future with contingencies. He correctly knows much of the future as possible/probable, not actual/certain before it comes to pass. Exhaustive foreknowledge of future free will contingencies would require determinism (contrary to love, freedom, relationship).
I would not dare to limit God in any way to say that there is anything which God cannot know, so I definitely do not accept your interpretation. But I would point out from my understanding of physics that it is not always possible to know something without changing its state or its nature. Therefore I say that God's choice to limit his knowledge is the essence of our free will, and for God to excersise His power to know what we will do would destroy that free will.
I do not believe in limiting God according to the definitions of men. Omniscience and Omnipotence mean that power and knowledge are at the beck and call of God, NOT that He is at their mercy. In particular, my God is not defined by power and knowledge or any need to preserve these things. They are as dispensible to His divinity as they are dispensible to our humanity. I therefore categorically deny that God is incapable of risk, sacrifice, limiting Himself, or of granting us the privacy of our future choices.
God decided to become a helpless infant born to Mary and thus decided that while in that form not to do anything that a helpless infant would not do. Any thought on our part that God could any time change His mind and act contrary to His original decision is clearly way off base. He simply does not do things like that. God's decisions are the laws of the universe, and therefore when God decided not to do anything that a helpless infant could not do, that is indistinguishable from laying aside His infinite knowlege and power to be a helpless infant in truth. But that infant was nevertheless still fully the God that created both the heavens and earth, for that helplessness does not make Him any less God than losing an arm or memory makes us any less the person who we are. God is a PERSON not a human concept and definition! Therefore I can without any hint of heresy fully embrace the following biblical passages.
Phillipians 2:5-8 "Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,"
Luke 2:52 "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men."
Mark 13:32, "But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."
So also do I embrace hypostatic union that Jesus was fully God and fully man, that without any loss to His divinity that He was in truth a man in every sense of the word sharing in our experience of finitude gaining access to the power of God through prayer as He said any human being could do if they had but the faith the size of a mustard seed. Otherwise, why did Jesus say in Matthew 26:53 "Or do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels?" If Jeus had all the infinite power and knowledge of God, why would he even need the help of angels? Thus as fully man in every way, Jesus was indeed an example that we can aspire to follow, while as fully God, He was also a reconcilliation between man and God that relies on the power of God to save us and not upon the efforts of human beings. We nailed
God (the one who created us and love us more than we love ourselves) to a cross to torture and mock Him. We must choose between the sin that did (and continues to do) that to Him and the God who loves us so much that He is willing to bear the consequences of our sin.
Lonster said:
While OV admits to a certain amount of foreknowledge, I believe it isn't a good idea to place any kind of limit on God's ability.
Unlike many Christians, I would not dream of saying there is anything which God cannot do. Nevertheless I think that God created us precisely for our free will, and that in fact our free will is indistinguishable from our life. Thus I believe that the preservation of our free will is God's greatest concern. In fact I think that it is the very nature of sin that it destroys our free will and potentiality as living organisms through its addictive habitual characteristics.
In other word God delights in our unpredictablity and it is His great sorrow that in our sin we are so utterly predictable and boring. With God's omnipresent knowledge and power it is beyond trivial to predict or manipulate us around the rather pathetic scope of the free will that remains to us. This is in fact why God must be extremely careful in how he interferes in our lives for our free will is rather fragile. Furthermore the the human tendency to abandon our own free will abdicating our responsibility for our own life and our world, is a rather pervasive one all the way back to the Garden of Eden. In fact, as long as our grasp on our own free will remains so weak, the overwhelmingly powerful influence of God presence becomes something of dubious value in our lives. It is only with a very strong affirmation of our responsibility in the acknowledgement of our sins and the will to turn away from them that a personal relationship with God can be regained without actually doing us harm.