You appear to have some difficulty with conditional statement. When someone says, "if A then B", they are not asserting B and they are not asserting A. But such a statement does allow you to conclude "if not B then not A". Which is precisely my purpose for making the statement. So when I say,
"If God's choices are based on a knowledge of precisely and absolutely how we will respond to His influence, then it is God's choices that determine our actions rather than our choices because God inflence is obviously irresistable"
My intent is to say that God's choices are NOT based on a knowledge of precisely and absolutely how we will respond to His influence, because what you call Calvinism, that "God's choices that determine our actions rather than our choices" is not acceptable.
These are just words. If God knows what we will do as a consequence of His own choices then what we do is a consequence of His choices rather than ours. Therefore I deny that He has any such knowledge, by His own choice.
Competing wills? God is conflicted? Contradiction vanishes here with clarity of thought. God's will is for us to live, but our life requires us to connect with the source of life ("choose Him" as you say). But this avails nothing if we do not choose freely. Free will is the essence of life, therefore we cannot live unless we choose Him of our own free will. So it is by the Grace of God that He intervenes in our life to liberate our free will from the bondage of sin sufficient for us to make a choice. It is just that many people living long in the habits of sin feel like they are dragged against their will because they confuse these habits with their free will. Our free will is clearly seen afterwards when we are free to return to our sin like a dog to its vomit, if we so choose.
It would be fair to say that I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. I see no reason why foreknowledge is necessary to achieve Grace. Certainly I do not see any reason why God's providence requires anything like exhaustive foreknowledge. Grace is not about prediction but about a relationship with God. Either we are under the relentless downward acceleration of the law of sin (like the law of gravity) or we are in the hands of God. Grace is sufficient because God is sufficient and He does not need to predict when He is there to take whatever action is needed to make it so.
I think perhaps you are confusing Grace with the fact that we can only know who is saved by to who makes it to the end. But God knows who He has taken into His care without any such foreknowledge.
I think the question of whether the future is real or exists is irrelevant, for this is merely a matter of ones point of view. We can think of the future existing and yet retain free will if some aspects of the future exists in an indeterminate state. Do not forget that Christianity includes things like prophecy and predestination. One can think of our world of time and space as book for which God has written the broad outlines while leaving portions or details of the story for us to write ourselves. God can open the book to any page but why would He do such a thing? For the greatest enjoyment and participation in our live, aesthetics dictates that He will read the book in a time ordered fashion, and therefore not knowing the portions we write until the proper time.
It is another lesson of physics that it often takes several seemingly contradictory ways of looking at the same thing to get a complete understanding of it.
Your reasoning here is not intellegible to me.
That is a misuse of the this term I think, because I believe Traditional Christianity embraces the whole spectrum of Christian experience from Calvinism to Open Theism. The term Traditional Christianity more usually refers the the results of the fourth century eccumenical councils and the emphasis on the teachings of Paul as the basis for Christian theology, which is why I like to call it "Pauline Christianity" (although I must admit that calling it this would certainly have horrified the apostle Paul himself). In any case this term refers to the constrast with such groups as Mormons, Jehova Witnesses and the Moonies who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus and who draw much of their ideas from the Bible but who do not abide by the eccumenical councils and have a bit of difficulty with the teachings of the apostle Paul.
I not only do not recognize the authority of Augustine, I do not even hold him in much regard. I consider the means by which his difficulties with Pelagius were resolved to be typical of the depths to which the Catholic church (and Augustine himself) had sunk. Sure the views of Pelagius were extreme but no more so than Augustine himself (with the heavy influence of Manicheaism he brought to Christianity) who once said that salvation was simply a matter of God selecting replacements for the angels that had fallen. I do not see the hand God working in the church (as in the eccumenical councils) past the fourth century. For while in the fourth century eccumenical councils we see divinely inspired compromise to embrace the fullness of Chritianity, in later autocratic decisions of the Catholic church we see a narrowing of Christianity as typified by Augustine's condemnation of Pelagius.