Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer
This is a long overdure response to SOTK's post #82...
Manipulating in the sense of influencing not controlling; we are not puppets on a string. God is able to influence His friends and manipulate His enemies in many of the same ways you do your own and then some. God knows everyone better than they know themselves. He knows every detail of whatever circumstance He is looking at that can be known and is therefore able to act on the available information in order to work things out the way He wants for them to work out.
Take Pharaoh for example, it is not necessary to believe that God overcame his free will in order to get him to let the Israelites go. In fact, we have all the reason in the world to say that He did not.
First of all, the whole story wouldn't make sense had God been controlling Pharaoh. What would have been the point of 10 plagues that were according to the text designed to convince Pharaoh to let them go? Why not simply force him to say "Yeah, okay. Here, take all our gold with you as you go!" and then that would have been the end of it. Instead, God performed undeniable miracle after undeniable miracle. Why? The reason why is because God knew Pharaoh's heart, that it was wicked. God knew him well enough to know that if He performed miracles that made pharaoh look foolish and weak that he would respond with more and more hatred toward God and toward Moses and his people. Thus, in a manner of speaking, God did indeed harden pharaoh's heart in that He was the one who was intentionally shoving the truth in Pharaoh's face by performing miracle after miracle. But the point is, that PHAROAH COULD HAVE REPENTED! Had he done so, his son would not have been killed and God's people would still have won their freedom. God would have won and would have had opportunity to show His mercy rather than His judgment, which is precisely what He would have done.
Now, you might think that this is a radical interpretation of what happened in Exodus, but the important thing to keep in mind is not how common a teaching it is but whether or not it conforms to the Biblical record. There is nothing in the text that contradicts this interpretation, nothing at all and yet this story is one of Calvinism's most favored proof texts! The simple fact is, they read their theology into the text, nothing in the Exodus account requires of belief that God took over Pharaoh's ability to choose for himself what he would do. If this were not so, then God's punishment of him would have been unjust, which is the primary point!
God is a loving God who is both merciful and just. If our theology serves to undermine such major and undeniable attributes of God's character then we can know that our theology is in error. God created us so that He might love us and that we might love Him. Our loving Him is absolutely contingent upon our ability to choose for ourselves. If we only "love" because we have been predestined to do so, then that isn't love at all! It might look like love to someone who doesn't know that such actions have been preprogrammed but God would certainly know and He's the only one that matters since He is the object of such so called "love". Thus the doctrine of predestination cuts at the very heart of the meaning of our very existence.
God's mercy and justice are undermined, indeed made meaningless, in the same way. If we cannot choose then it is impossible to assign any moral implications to our actions. We are simply doing that which we have been preprogrammed to do. A rape would have no more moral implication than a toaster browning a piece of bread. This being the case, for God to punish or reward any such act would be fundamentally unjust. We can know for a fact and be absolutely certain that we do have a freewill because the goodness and justice of God are undeniable presuppositions of the Christian faith. To deny one is to deny both.
What you are talking about then is not logic, it's information and perhaps intelligence. God definitely has access to far more information than do we and of course He is vastly more intelligent than we are. Those are givens and are not in dispute.
To avoid confusion I would, if I were you, find a different term to use rather than logic. Otherwise, you run the risk of saying that God is irrational without intending to do so.
That's because the two are logical contradictions, they are mutually exclusive.
Impossible! You are literally trying to have your cake and eat it too. That is just not an option, you can either eat the cake or you can keep it for another day, you cannot do both at the same time. If your actions are predetermined then they are not free, period. Freedom is the ability to do or to do otherwise. If your actions are foreknown or predetermined either one then you cannot do otherwise and are therefore not free.
This sort of made me chuckle.
You've mixed Arminianism (foreknowledge), Calvinism(predeterminism), and Open Theism(free will) all together here.
You're a "Calminian Open Theist"! :chuckle:
Well if predeterminism is true then your actions, the fact that they make sense to you, your leanings, etc were all predetermined as well. In fact, if predestination is true then I was predestined to believe in free will! How much sense does that make?
Resting in Him,
Clete
P.S. Sorry it took so long to respond, I've been pretty busy lately.
God bless!
I plan on giving you a full response soon.
