Yes it is! Just because you don't know where what you believe comes from doesn't distance you.
You're not only stupid, you're an ***. I know more about Open Theism than you ever will.
Enyart learned from Hill. Hill learned from these men.
Not so!
Bob Hill has been teaching Open Theism longer than you've been alive.
Without them, you have no OV.
Not so! And I suspect you knew that this wasn't so when you said it.
I agree that these men are responsible for popularizing the doctrine in modern times and for having coined the term "open theism" but that isn't the same thing and you know it. Open Theism is nothing new, its simply old Christianity with all the Biblical unsupportable bits removed. Its effectively the Reformation Mark II. Just as Luther wasn't formulating anything new so much as he was removing the Catholic barnacles from the true Biblical faith, the OV movement is doing the same with pagan Greek philosophy and leaving, as John Sanders put it, "a more Biblically faithful, rationally coherent, and practically satisfying account of God and the divine-human relationship..."
Nope, this is all you. If you didn't care, you wouldn't have breeched our mutual contract of engagement. So you are wrong on both counts.
You are in fact a blithering idiot.
I can't even believe you wrote that. :rotfl:
Asserting doesn't make any kind of intelligent case that I'm aware of. Keep working with it, maybe you'll find an avenue instead of a roadblock. Just recognize I'm not in the car with you. I got out and took a taxi away from this vitriol. You're on your own.
If vitriol is what you deserve then that's what you get from me.
All you have to do is stop saying stupid things.
So you keep telling me. Do you believe if you continue to assert that I eventually believe you?
No, I believe the exact opposite.
This is your retort to everyone.
You're not only stupid, you're a liar. You knew when you said this that it wasn't so.
I call only stupid people, stupid. I detect stupid people by reading their posts. When they say something stupid and then I refute their stupidity and then they repeat their stupidity like I never said anything or as though I said the exact opposite of what I actually said and then after trying at least once more to correct their error they continue repeating their stupidity then that tells me that I'm dealing with someone who hasn't simply made a stupid mistake but rather is in fact actually stupid.
You qualify! When you repent then you'll get treated with respect and dignity. Until then you won't and I will use you and your posts in any way I personally decide is in my best interests whether you like it or not.
"Oh no, you just shot my objection all to pieces with that there!"
OV gets to qualify and limit its own definition but the rest of us "better not touch that sacred cow." I get it.
Typical response from someone who is incapable of thinking clearly.
You don't get to tweak our definition and then object to it on the basis of YOUR OWN TWEAK!!!!
:doh::duh:
Of course you are. Why would you break our mutual agreement to ignore one another over something like this
Because I didn't want to ignore it. And if you'll recall I didn't deal with it substantively, I simply piped up to point out that you're a blithering idiot on the basis that you claim to be omniscient - by any definition.
You mean like you are doing right now? I'd like to think it is because you think my position provocative. Perhaps you thought I'd have no strong basis for this and saw it as an easy irresistable 'win' in your debate repetiore and are now frustrated. Perhaps you just like reading your own words over and over again in self-infatuation.
How low do you have your bar set in regards to defining a "substantive conversation"?
This is not what I would call a deep and thought provoking conversation, Lon. This is more like me having fun seeing how many opportunities you are going to give me to remind the world that you're an idiot.
And "strong basis"! Are you kidding me! You don't have any basis at all! You change the definition of a term and then object to the definition on the basis of the change that you introduced!
It's absolutely laughable!
:chuckle: Strong basis! :chuckle:
So here it is, finally. Something intelligent from you even if you didn't mean it to be. The Open View redefines Omniscience. "Omniscience isn't really omniscience like the majority of Christians think. The term must be qualified."
When I come behind and say your assertion is wrong and hasn't been thought through very well, you come behind me and say "It's my ball, you are stupid! Only OVers get to play with this ball!"
There is no qualification!!!!
:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
You're killing me!!!
So OV has the audacity to take a term we esteem highly and know what it means, redefine it, and we don't get to even question the redefiniton?
There is no redefinition!!!
Omniscience means to know everything - period.
The addition of the word "knowable" before the period is, in reality, a redundancy. We only say it so as to point out that the typical Christian takes the concept further than is rational.
You are the only one redefining anything with this "to me" nonsense.
Do you wonder why theologians are starting to list OV as a cult?
No, I know why. It has nothing to do with theology.
You make statements in here that JW's have said to me for years.
I met a JW once who thought the sky was blue!
Imagine that! :noway:
So OV has the audacity to take a term we esteem highly and know what it means, redefine it, and we don't get to even question the redefiniton?
We've not redefined it, you have. We're simply taking it back and using the term correctly and rationally.
And this is my point of contention with the OV definition. It doesn't convey in the definition OV offers. Even though it is a stupid question to you, it allows for misconstruing. The definition is inaccurate. Because you are qualifying omni, it must be carefully worded what this does and does not allow. To try to pare God's qualities in any way shape or fashion, is not the answer. I believe OV bold in trying to do so and expect that answers should be purposeful and precise.
There is no redefinition. Omniscient means to know everything.
Because the OV definition is stating what is knowable and not: "for God."
I'm trying to constrast it to 1) Show that it isn't precise enough 2) that it doesn't separate from man enough that it is a good definition for God.
"for God" would be redundant. The context of the conversation is divinity and the traits thereof. To say that God is omniscient is to say that God knows everything.
My problem: OV is attempting what I believe out of their league (and ours) but understandably necessary in rejecting the traditional view.
It is trying to qualify a DIVINE attribute. This is a slippery slope and must be traversed much more carefully and much more accurately for it to be even considered.
There is no qualification apart from requiring that our doctrine remain with the confines of reality.
I do not need nor want your help.
We don't even want to consider any man's qualification of the divine attributes!
You have no choice. Even the requirement of there being no qualifications is itself a qualification which you've imposed arbitrarily.
Surely you must agree that God is limited to reality, right? I mean not even I believe that you're stupidity extends so deep as to cause you to accept as possible the idea that God is both real and not real.
What we speculate over but take for granted, OV has run with where angels fear to tread: analyzing and trying to humanly grasp those attributes that are His alone.
Your doctrine is not magically off limits because it happens to be your theology proper.
It is your doctrine that teaches you that God knows everything including things that are unknowable.
It is your doctrine that also teaches you to take for granted such a blatant contradiction.
You and your doctrine are what I'm questioning, not God and His attributes. God is who He is and will remain so regardless of my theology or yours. He is neither afraid of nor bothered by our examination of these issues so long as our goal is to know and to accept the truth about Him and His Word, which was given to us so that we might know Him and the fullness of His loving kindness toward us in Christ.
In so doing, there is a real danger of inaccuracy for we are incapable of qualifying that which is God's alone.
You just did!
We'd rather be on the absurd or safe side of this debate saying God can make square-circles (though we don't believe it a good question) than to try and qualify as created limited intellectual humans something completely beyond us.
Well I don't believe it.
I feel like deleting everything else in this whole post and quoting only this single sentence. How rare it is to find someone who had sunk to such depths of intellectual depravity as to openly and blatantly admit that he would rather be irrational than to question his own doctrine.
You can expect that I will be quoting you on this, Lon. Repeatedly.
As
Enyart said in Battle Royale:
Bob Enyart said:
Passages of God’s desire to forget sin are far more literal and “exhaustive” than any strained “proof-texts” for omniscience. We know that because these passages flow from the goodness and righteousness of God, whereas the omniscience “proof-texts” deal with quantity rather than quality. Thus they exaggerate the superficial at the expense of the substantive. No one can impose vulgar duty on God. Such basic biblical teaching shows that the non-biblical term “omniscience” overstates the truth.
Bob is so right!
The idea that God is omniscient is entirely unbiblical.
Then why do it other than to separate from the rest of Christianity?
The reason it is irrelevant to define what is unknowable is because you, by having used the word 'omniscient', have already presupposed the concept of "to know". Unknowable is simply the negation of knowable. In other words, by saying that God knows everything, the exception of those things which cannot be known is implied.
Paul explained a similar situation when discussing the fact that all things will be placed under Jesus' feet. All things does not include God the Father and it not necessary to explain that. Its implied. Obvious. Simple.
Put another way, you'd have to be stupid not to understand it!!!
God can't know the unknowable because if He did know it then it wouldn't be unknowable! Thus to say that God knows everything knowable, while technically accurate, is a redundancy. The point in saying it that way isn't about redefining the word but rather is to point out that a lot of people have taken it to mean something that it could not possibly mean.
This is why I don't necessarily believe OV to warrant cult status, at least not yet.
Nobody cares what you believe is necessary.
I'm saying fix whatever is vague so that the rest of us discern and assess rightly.
It is not incumbent upon the Open Theist to explain the doctrine so that the stupidest people among us can understand it.
Of course I'm being pedantic. I believe it necessary for 1) grasping any similarity and divergence between OV and the rest of orthodoxy and 2) for congealing on important distinctions. If there is a vague idea about an OV term, it should not be seen as an opportunity to stab the guy asking the question but 1) if pedantic, a gentle and appropriate answer rather than overblown rhetoric. 2) if irrelevant, showing it as such by ignoring it and moving on rather than breaking a mutual agreement or quickly pointing to the answer and moving on.
This would be true if the objection weren't so stupid.
I agree. My point however is that the definition must necessarily not be even vaguely applicable to man.
Only an idiot would think it was.
Go ahead and blow that off but I'm not saying that merely to be insulting. You're objection is beyond ridiculous.
It is again, a difficult proposition to try and qualify the divine attributes for exactly this reason.
You just did it - just now - when you wrote the next sentence.
We are using human terms to try and explain that which isn't created or comprehensible.
So you admit once again that your doctrine is irrational!
Geeze, Lon! Why didn't you say so in the first place?!
What the Hell is the point of debating something that you believe must be irrational to be correct?
How would you suggest one proceed in any attempt to analyze something that is intentionally irrational?
Do you understand the concept of falsifiability and why it is important?
It MUST take a very careful tread.
WHY?
If its irrational who gives a damn how careful you are with it?
What are you afraid of; that your going to accidentally turn into something that makes sense?
This is why I believe the traditional perspective that includes the mysteries of that which is divine to be a stronger position. It guards against it.
It guards against what? The ability to question orthodoxy? The ability to potentially falsify one's religious beliefs? The ability to meaningfully ask, "Is this really true?"?
That in the world are you guarding against, Lon? You're ability to think?
This is stupidity on the level of Nang and AMR.
Outrageous!
Again, all that is unicorns, God knows.
Which is nothing. Unicorns do not exist in reality. If they are imaginary then God knows the imaginings of people but that doesn't turn imaginary things into real things.
Once we set out a proposition, even imaginitive, God knows it.
He knows it as a proposition, not as reality.
God knows about Darth Vader but that doesn't mean Darth Vader is real!
Whatever Yoda is eating now, God knows according to whoever is imagining it.
Yoda does not exist except as a figment of people's imaginations and popular folk lore and fairy tales. God knows those this as such and that does not make them real. Yoda is not real!
Why am I having to argue that Yoda is not real?
Are you seriously trying to convince me that you aren't stupid? If so, you probably should try a different tactic!
It is Luke's astronaut food stick, swamp stew. God has to know the future (both of men and His own counsel) or there wouldn't be prophets or need of them.
STUPIDITY!!!
If the future could not be predicted there wouldn't be weather men.
Imagine that! Mere mortal men able to predict the future with some useful level of accuracy!
You're probably right though. God is so inept that unless He were able to sneak a peak into the future, He'd probably never get anything right. We're stupid (by comparison with God) and so we can only get thing right a day or so in advance. God must really be a brainless twit seeing as how He has access to any and all points of fact that pertain to any prediction He might want to make and still He is unable to predict a thing without having to look up the answer in the back of the cosmic book.
Not when I can imagine it and God knows that imagination thoroughly.
Your imagination is known as imagination. If you imagine an apple, it doesn't cause a real apple to pop into existence.
An imaginitive apple is an apple, not a pear, not an orange.
I'd like to see you eat the apple. I'd like to see you slice it and get a seed from it and plant it and grow it in your back yard.
Read the following sentence very very sloooowwwllllyyyy...
An - imaginary - apple - is -not - a - real - apple, - its - an - imaginary - apple, - Lon!
Again, I'm trying to caution putting parameters on the divine attributes, not playing sci-fi.
You just did - again!
The common retort is that these things aren't knowable, but they are. God knows what is imaginitive because our very examples are knowable objects. We cannot think of anything that God couldn't or doesn't know. It is pure assertion to say that God cannot know the future and is only ever said because it seems to contradict that spark of freewill.
It does not "seem to contradict". There have been very specific rational arguments put forward that prove that it does in fact contradict.
Why would that matter to you anyway? Who gives a rip if something contradicts within an irrational worldview? If nothing contradicted, your whole "human reasoning" argument would be for naught, right?
This is the only reason to even attempt to place a parameter of some kind upon God's knowledge. It is suppositionally driven but dangerously so.
Everything is suppositionally driven, Lon. EVERYTHING!
The only question is whether it is done so rationally or not.
This is understood, but again the reasoning behind it (it is a drive I have, I always want to know what someone is thinking for stating or doing what they do) is a desire to preserve freewill in even attempting to limit or qualify. Without this, there is no necessity to try.
Freewill is not the presupposition. The character of God, His justice, love and righteousness (i.e. God's qualitative attributes) is the presupposition. From which, both free will and an understanding that God cannot know the future exhaustively follow necessarily.
It is taking a human concerned paradigm and readjusting the divine rather than taking a divine paradigm and adjusting the human paradigm.
You are wrong as explained above. It goes much deeper than free will. Free will is only another of several conclusions which follow inextricably from the foundational presupposition that God is personal, relational, rational, good, and loving.
The paramount will logically impair one way or the other because there is a paradox between freewill and determinism.
It isn't a paradox, its a contradiction. There is a difference, although I wouldn't expect you to know what it is.
HyperCalvinism is on one extreme and OVers on the other.
Thanks for the compliment.
I suspect the answer is neither and untenuable where humans are concerned in our present economy of knowledge base (that is, I am and have been asserting and assessed as absurd by you, that we don't have the tools for the job and are breaking things in trying to do a job that isn't ours to do nor within our capabilities, this has been unsuccessfully attempted throughout the whole of history).
If this were really the way things were, no truth claim could ever be falsified. Any objection to any truth claim whatsoever could be met with, "Well, we can't understand it because we poor stupid miserable human beings don't have the tools for the job of understanding such high and lofty ideas."
I'm saying stop while the OV is saying "No, I can do this."
Its the other way around. You want to blast right past the barrier of rationality and we are saying "NO! You can't do that!"
I'm saying things are getting broken and our job is now doubled.
I'm saying you're broken and am explaining explicitly why, and how you can fix it.
This particular question is minute in that I'm saying this wrench doesn't work on that screw as a particular to the whole project.
David Koresh likely made the same sort of comment when confronted about the truth of his Messiahship.
The traditional stance has been less than speculative not because we are being lazy, but because we are binning the attributes of God in unknowable categories.
The attributes you are referring to are unbiblical and irrational!
If the Bible came right out and stated that God can do anything anyone can image then you might have a leg to stand on but it doesn't say that! The Bible never describes God in the irrational way the "traditional stance" describes Him. Aristotle described his god that way but the Bible never does.
We may have put a few tools and supplies where they don't belong, but because they are His, they are not appropriately usable by us. In philosophy, we play with where things 'might' go, but it isn't really tenuable by us. I think the difference is, we speculate, and OV grabs up those tools and bangs away and we assess some of the tools being used inappropriately, others as being questionable, but all tools belonging to Him where we can touch, but should not break or go beyond what is clear so that nothing gets theologically broken and His things are treated with respect. Of course we are into a sibling spat over it. It logically follows for our respective concerns.
How in the world can you sit there and say something about how something "logically follows" from the irrational? :bang:
Can you really be that blind?
You type this big paragraph about how we don't have the tools to understand God's attributes (i.e. you can't apply logic to theology proper) and then end it with a sentence about how something "logically follows"! Where exactly to do think our ability to reason comes from, Lon? Where do you think the concept of logic gets its meaning?
Where's my duct tape! I think my head is going to explode!
Resting in Him,
Clete
