ARCHIVE: Open Theism part 2
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Philetus
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commissions, commandments, foreknowledge, all made meaningless by God's decrees ....
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Think of it like prayer when you ask for something. God already knows what you want before you ask. You must ask, for the asking is in the chain of the predestination. Similarly, the elect are called to God in the chain of the predestination of their hearing the Word of God.
We don't have because we don't ask in prayer.
You wrote: "I prefer to witness to people out of a sense that I am active and appreciated for my efforts."
The elect become regenerated because we obey the commandment to preach the Good News to everyone. In so doing you are actively participating in the chain of events leading to God's predestination of the elect. You are loved by God because you have done as He commanded--loving God means obeying Him.
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No I would not, for God would not be sovereign, but a contingent being, and we would not be assured that His will would be realized. In effect, what the Scriptures have clearly stated about God's sovereignty and omniscience would be untrue. Who could trust this kind of God?
elected4ever
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Then why don't you Philetus. What you guys keep saying is that we remain subject to the human will and then say that we act in accordance with that will and therefore sin or not sin as a matter of choice. Nothing could be further from the truth.I'd rather trust God.
Christ took upon Himself the acts of the human will which are not subject to God and operates according to its own lust and desires. It is dead to God and cannot do the will of God. The human will becomes dead to us and we are no longer subject to its lust and desires. It has them but we are not subject to them. They no longer exist as for as God is concerned because they were nailed to the cross of Christ.
In order to do the will of God you must be of God, born again, then you have the righteousness of God and do according to the righteousness of God.
We really do according to our own will but is that will born of man of is it born of God?
In essences that is the only choice we have isn't it. I present the gospel because it is my nature to do so. The will I obey in doing so is my own. That will is born of God and is without sin.
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My very long reply has been posted to the thread you started.
PKevman
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AMR said:
Quite frankly I have a busy life, I read what I can and respond to what I have time to. This is an internet forum, so people are free to discuss and/or respond to whatever they wish to. I don't always have the time to spend 5 hours reading your enormous posts. (no offense). It is not necessary to read through an entire thread to make a comment or to post a rebuttal to a specific argument presented.
This is not a Battle Royale where things have been cohesively structured all the way through. In most threads people jump around quite a bit.
Very simple. Your whole premise is based on faulty preconceived notions. All of Calvinism rests on these SAME preconceived notions. The fact that you are unwilling to examine and consider how God presents Himself in the Bible eludes you because you have been confused by a haze of theological mumbo jumbo. Wake up! God does not get the glory from every little wicked thing that occurs. In fact God hates sin. God is not responsible for the creation of sin either. Calvinism is false teaching, plain and simple.
Actually it was answering your demand for posting Bible verses, but you let that go over your head.
You have not answered the question asked. The text answers the question. Let's see if you can get it right: Why did God bring the animals to Adam? The text shows it. You denied what the text says when you said this:
AMR said:
The Word of God says:
Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name.
Wow this text really bugs you doesn't it. To see means simply to see as you already observed above. It means the Lord wanted to see what Adam would call the animals. God interacts with man because He loves us and is interested in us. This is shown throughout the Bible. God was excited to see what His brand new creation (created in His image) was going to call the other animals He had created!
I agree with this. God can make plans and follow through with those plans. He is God. I agree too that God planned woman when He created man. He had done this with all of His other creatures, so I see no reason why He wouldn't have planned to create the woman as well. I am not sure what this has to do with answering the question asked though. You are blurring the issue, and I am not sure if it is intentional or not.....
Agree.
Because it happened. And God wanted us to know how He interacted with Adam. That is why He told Moses to write it.
This is certainly a possibility, however we are not told this explicitly in the text, so we are really guessing at this point. You understand that the above is not Bible but your own view, correct?
Agreed.
That may have been a purpose of God's, but again the text does not tell us this explicitly, so we have to guess at that. The text does tell us that Adam realized he had no helper suitable for him. I suppose it isn't a far reach to believe that God planned all of that for Adam to realize he too needed a helper. If you believe that just because I'm an open theist that I believe God had no clue He had made Adam alone, then you are badly mistaken! It seems that your views on open theism are based on a lot of misunderstandings and false assumptions on what OT'ers actually believe! The question is are you willing to listen to the points brought up by open theists rather than your presupposed false views of us? We love the Bible and God just as much as you do!
No. It is affirming a Biblical doctrine and position. What does God value more- Love or prophecy?
Hermeneutics is an art and a science, and one that I am well-versed and familiar with. The best way to interpret Scripture is with Scripture. Would you agree or disagree with this statement?
AMR said:
AMR- do you realize that THIS is a hermeneutic by which YOU interpret Scripture?
The whole "hopscotch" analogy does not fit this situation as that is not what I was doing when I stated to you that God is love and that God loves us. My point was in citing one of my clear texts on the issue we are discussing and showing that it is the love of God for mankind that leads Him to change His mind about judging them, even if He had PLANNED to do so, and even if he had SAID to do so! That is clearly what He says in the text I quoted! When a man repents it changes God's mind about His intentions for that man!
As to the rest of your asinine posts, I will just say that I utterly reject the false doctrines of Mormonism, Universalism, Annihilationism and the like. Please attempt to be more substantive with your answers and understand that the amount of words typed does not always indicate substance to an argument!
God bless.
Take that back! I am not wrong about how every Calvinist I have ever asked that question, has answered it! Every one of them has given the same answer! "because God commanded us to."
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Let's be clear, you wrote:
"their answer is, that they only share the gospel because God commanded them to. Not that it makes a difference."
See that last part? We are commanded to preach the Good News to all peoples because we do not know the elect who come to righteousness from the hearing of the word. God predestines the elect and the means of their answer to the call. Preaching the Good News fulfills the chain of the predestination of the elect. In other words, it DOES make a difference. Your statement was wrong.
"Not that it makes a difference" was a separate sentence and was my own editorial comment! If it seemed like I was claiming that Calvinists would say that I apologize.
edit: Is this more clear?
their answer is, that they only share the gospel because God commanded them to. Not that their answer makes a difference.
elected4ever
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Dalmar, every christian preaches the gospel as an act of his own will. It is the Father's will that we do so. Is it wrong that the nature of the christian to act in accordance with the nature of God? I think not. That should be the expected act of a righteous person not some person following orders. If you know the will of God and you know that those who are born of God do the will of God, why do you call the christian a robot when it is his nature to do the will of God?
But we can just as easily choose not to act according to God's will.
I am not the one who believes any man is a robot!
Christians who believe in free will, preach the Gospel because they understand that it is God's will and because they know it makes a difference! (faith comes from hearing) If Christians who do not believe in free will, preach the Gospel, it could only be because they believe it is God's will. It could not be because preaching the gospel is of any consequence, because those who were elected will be saved, and those who were not elected, will not be saved!
elected4ever
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Is the free will of the saved different than the free will of the lost? I think so. Jesus came to do the will of the Father. Does the fact that Jesus could not sin and was born of the seed of God in the flesh make Jesus any less a free will agent? To me, being born again or being of the elect has no bearing on the free will agency of the person because of who the person is.To me, the teaching that a person born of God commits sin is an irrational position. The ability to sin has become a choice that is unavailable to the child of God because the life of the child of God is of God and not of man. We are in the world but not of this world. The ability to commit sin is taken from us so the choice to sin is not a choice we can make.
Philetus
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Delmar, I think you were closer to the truth the first time. Nothing makes any difference in
"the chain of the predestination". (you gotta love that phrase) It's gona happen regardless. It's just another predestined 'link' in the chain. AMR is kidding himself if he thinks anything he does makes any difference any time to anyone in his closed view.
This sounds contrived to me AMR.
Where does it teach that God degreed all things without foreknowledge in the Bible?
Where does it teach that God's providence is unrelated to His decrees in the Bible?
How is that either one, even if they are so unrelated to one another, does not destroy self-determination? How is it possible for us to determine anything if it's already been determined before anyone ever existed?
And finally, to remain more on point (although I've somehow still allowed this discussion to stray completely away from Open Theism again), how is that that infralapsarian isn't falsified by the first sentence in chapter III of the WCF (and probably several others)?
Resting in Him,
Clete
elected4ever
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That is a totally irrational statement and shows the propensity of the human will to reject the gospel of Christ. Why do you indulge in such irrational thinking? Why is the OV position on this board so negative in its articulation?
elected4ever
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Clete, Why are you so adamant in hanging on to your human will when you know that will is against God? You know that Jesus gave His life to free us from that will.
My supposed reasoning?
Without "my supposed reasoning" you wouldn't even be able to read God's self revelation nor understand it in the slightest! - Which is the whole point, by the way!
How can you not see that you just contradicted yourself here? You just used a law of reason to undermine the laws of reason.
You would have no way of knowing that God's word has said something without using reason! So if you change the rules of reason to adjust to God's word, how do you know what you think God's word says is really what it says? Maybe you should have adjusted your reasoning the opposite way? How would you know whether your reasoning adjustment was correct?
That is not a rhetorical question E4E. I would like it if you actually tried to give me a cogent answer.
It is not reasoning that I adjust though! My knowledge increases and my thinking skills improve and so my conclusions are adjusted over time. That much cannot be disputed, but as a man grows and learns, if his thinking is sound, he should become more and certain of the soundness of his conclusions and thus more and more rooted in the truths contained within God's word. It is only when his thinking is muddled (unsound reasoning) that he is blown about by every wind of doctrine throughout his life, as many people are.
Of course not! I never said it was. You cannot rely on sound reason alone but it must be combined with God's word, fervent prayer and humility. While there is much about God that we can know through sound reason and simply the observance of the universe around us, God's word contains truths that we could not hope to have figured out with God having revealed it to us.
This point demonstrates, I think better than anything else you've said in a long time, how you over react to the open view's use of sound reason. The settled view has a very liberal (i.e. loose or pliable) stance on the use of reason. They pretty much ignore whatever law of reason they need to in order to maintain their doctrine. And while the open view attempts a more conservative approach to the use of reason, you think or feel like like we've thrown the baby out with the bath water and somehow elevated reason over and above not only the Bible but God Himself! That just isn't so E4E! Sound reason is not the object of our faith but a tool used to understand both the Him the written revelation which He wrote about Himself.
You and I could both affirm this statement but I have a strong feeling that your meaning would be something entirely different than mine.
I would say this concerning some doctrine which has not been fully explained but that does not contain any outright contradictions. The Trinity comes to mind right off the bat as does the fact that God created everything in this vast universe in six days and that the entire Earth was flooded. There is missing information, or at the very least, information that has not been taught to me concerning all of those issues and several others but none of them violate some fundamental law of reason in any way. There is nothing self-contradictory, for example about it raining for 40 days and 40 nights and so even without direct evidence that such a thing occurred, I can trust that it did on the basis of God's word, without throwing sound reason in the toilet.
Can you give me an example of the sort of things you are talking about that must be taken on "faith" and not reason?
I used to be a Calvinist and so I know exactly what you are talking about here but my point, once again, isn't that we don't ever make mistakes with our reasoning. Indeed, we clearly do just that. But making errors of reason doesn't mean that we throw out reason! We could never detect that we had made an error without the application of sound reason to our conclusions! It is the correction of error and the establishment of the objective truth which makes sound reason so vitally important! There can be no objective truth if sound reason is not allowed to falsify truth claims? Without sound reason, there is no way to prove that Benny Hinn's, or Kenneth Copeland's or David Coresh's or AMR's, or yours or my use of the Bible is in error. Without sound reason, we're all just as right as the other guy!
How am I wrong?
Resting in Him,
Clete
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