ARCHIVE: Open Theism part 3

[godrulz]

I still maintain that Num. and Mal. proof texts, in context, do not show that God CANNOT change His mind (would contradict 39 other verses that explicitly said He can and did change His mind). This is proof texting to retain a philosophical view of immutability (the alternate explanation deals with your two texts, but I do not think you are answering the 39 other ones). Rather, the verses show that God does not always change His mind and that if He does, it is not in the same way as imperfect humans. God would not remain righteous if He did not change His mind sometimes (Jonah). Hezekiah is a clear picture of God changing His mind (you are a dead duck....prayer....I will add 15 years to your life). A contingent vs deterministic universe, a personal vs impersonal God, etc. supports God changing. Your texts can be seen with one paradigm or the other. You must also wrestle with passages like I Sam. 15 where God changes His mind about one thing, but refuses (not that He cannot, but will not) to change it about another matter.

We can take Scripture at face value if we change some aspects of tradition that are not truth. This does not mean we do not correctly distinguish figurative from literal (like God having feathers).

http://www.gregboyd.org/qa/open-the...nt-god-changing-his-mind-an-anthropomorphism/

Here is an answer to your objection. I have looked at most of the 39 verses that talk about God changing His mind, relenting, etc. I believe Open Theism will stand against the traditional view.

You are a bright guy. If you can buy into MAD (against the grain), I think you will be a delightful Open Theist when the lights go on.

While you are at it, the nature of eternity vs time is another pivotal issue. I assume you see eternity as 'eternal now' timelessness vs biblical endless time/duration? Of course, the exhaustive definite foreknowledge/omniscience issue will be a can of worms food for thought.

If you do not settle it now, see me in heaven with the Open Theist Club. The Calvinists, etc. will be across the street with their tails between their legs.:idea:

 

[Jerry Shugart]

Here is an answer to your objection

Again you failed to deal with my objection:

Can we understand here that what the Lord speaks of doing was not a real possibility?:

"Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation" (Ex.32:10).

How could He consume them without completely destroying the tribe of Judah and therefore breaking the following promise which He had made earlier?:

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be" (Gen.49:10).

Please address the point that I am making here.

I do believe that the future is open and the Calvinists are wrong. But there is a way to answer them that is far surpeior and this way one does not have to deny that God is all knowing. Here is a hint to another way to prove an Open View. Sir Robert Anderson wrote:

"What is, in plain words, the practical difficulty of election in its bearing upon the gospel? Why, that at some epoch in the past, God decided that this or that individual was to be saved or lost; and, therefore, that his future depends, not on the present action of the grace or the righteousness of the living God Who can appeal through the gospel to his heart and conscience, but on what is nothing more or less than an iron decree of fate. May not the whole difficulty depend on the arrogant supposition that God Himself is bound by the same laws that He has imposed upon His creatures?" (Anderson, The Gospel and Its Ministry [Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1978], p.78).

In His grace,
Jerry

 

[ThePresbyteers]

This message is deleted and closed.

 

[eph39]

The Supreme Being decides our choices... by providentially presenting circumstances He knows will elicit the desired decisions on our part.

If things work the way you say, He is completely unjust for condemning unbelievers specifically for their choice to remain in unbelief, since the Bible repeatedly presents it as a choice THEY make, with Him responding to that choice with condemnation. If you're right, condemnation specifically for unbelief is a sham. Of necessity, then, faith (also presented as a choice) unto salvation is also a sham. Neither a choice for belief nor a choice for unbelief really exist, according to you. Yet the Bible says they DO exist, and that we'll be dealt with according to our choice of response.

For you to be right, the whole concept of salvation and the Bible itself are reduced to a sham.

 

[Jerry Shugart]

If things work the way you say, He is completely unjust for condemning unbelievers specifically for their choice to remain in unbelief, since the Bible repeatedly presents it as a choice THEY make, with Him responding to that choice with condemnation. If you're right, condemnation specifically for unbelief is a sham. Of necessity, then, faith (also presented as a choice) unto salvation is also a sham. Neither a choice for belief nor a choice for unbelief really exist, according to you. Yet the Bible says they DO exist, and that we'll be dealt with according to our choice of response.

For you to be right, the whole concept of salvation and the Bible itself are reduced to a sham.

You are absolutely right, eph39. Not only is the Bible itself reduced to a sham but God is portrayed as a unjust tyrant who would make choices for people which leads sinning and then He punishes them for the very thing for which He is responsible!

But the Calvinists would rather cling to their mistaken beliefs and continue to portray God as being an unjust tyrant!

In His grace,
Jerry

 

[godrulz]

The Open view does not deny omniscience or that God is all-knowing. He knows all that is knowable and knows reality as it is. The future is partially open so He correctly knows it as possible/probable, not actual/certain (unless He determines to settle it by His ability).
We agree that God knows all there is to know. We disagree as to what are possible objects of certain foreknowledge (i.e. exhaustive definite foreknowledge is not compatible with libertarian free will).

 

[Jerry Shugart]

The Open view does not deny omniscience or that God is all-knowing.

If God is all knowing then He knows all of the future. But you turn around and deny that He only knows what is possible/probable about the future"

He knows all that is knowable and knows reality as it is. The future is partially open so He correctly knows it as possible/probable, not actual/certain (unless He determines to settle it by His ability).
We agree that God knows all there is to know.

We do not agree. I say that He knows all there is to know and that includes the things of the future. You deny that He can know those things.

We disagree as to what are possible objects of certain foreknowledge (i.e. exhaustive definite foreknowledge is not compatible with libertarian free will).

Since the Lord lives in the "ever present now" and is not constrained by "time" then He knows everything about what will happen in the future and that knowledge in no way limits one's libertarian free will.

I guess that you are not going to address the point which I continue to ask you to address:

Can we understand here that what the Lord speaks of doing was not a real possibility?:

"Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation" (Ex.32:10).

How could He consume them without completely destroying the tribe of Judah and therefore breaking the following promise which He had made earlier?:

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be" (Gen.49:10).

Please address the point that I am making here.

In His grace,
Jerry

 

[DFT_Dave]

If God is all knowing then He knows all of the future. But you turn around and deny that He only knows what is possible/probable about the future"

We do not agree. I say that He knows all there is to know and that includes the things of the future. You deny that He can know those things.

Since the Lord lives in the "ever present now" and is not constrained by "time" then He knows everything about what will happen in the future and that knowledge in no way limits one's libertarian free will.

I guess that you are not going to address the point which I continue to ask you to address:

Can we understand here that what the Lord speaks of doing was not a real possibility?:

"Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation" (Ex.32:10).

How could He consume them without completely destroying the tribe of Judah and therefore breaking the following promise which He had made earlier?:

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be" (Gen.49:10).

Please address the point that I am making here.

In His grace,
Jerry

God experiences time; has a past, a present, and a future. The creation of the world is in God's past and the day of judgement is in his future.

There are many philosophers, theologians, and mystical gurus who have misconceived God as a “singularity” who is immovable and changeless, existing in a timeless and spaceless eternity. But, believing such a deity created the world, or can manifest itself into the world of movement, change, and spacetime, “contrary to it’s nature”, is an “irrational faith”.

Since "finite" human beings are "limited" to the present, and cannot perform future acts, how is it that God can know what all of us will do even before we existed?

"We question prescience, because it necessitates limitations in the divine nature, denies to God motion, change, succession, and personality, renders him unable to cognize events as they really are, debars him from all personal and direct participation in the affairs of the human race, robs him of his liberty, and prohibits his active cooperation in the history, development, and government of his universe. And that it does thus so rob him is apparent, for he never can exercise any personal liberty relative to events that are inevitable and unchangeably foreknown. Foreknowledge imposes upon him a necessity which annihilates his freedom. Never could he change, determine, adapt, or originate a single event, object, or volition in all the future unfoldings and progressions of eternity."
Dr. L. D. McCabe, 1887

--Dave

 

[godrulz]

The future is inherently unknowable as a certainty, even for an omniscient being, unless it is caused by God, not other free moral agents. Just as omnipotence is limited by the doable (cannot create square circles), so omniscience is limited by the knowable (EDF is not possible in a contingent universe; 'eternal now' is also a wrong assumption and is not coherent nor helpful anyway).

There is also no providential advantage for EDF since God could not change the fixed future even if He wanted to. God is omnicompetent, not omnicausal, timeless, EDF.

I don't see the point about your verses, Jerry. They are not a problem for Open Theism. You have many more verses to deal with that will be a problem for your view. As in the past with MAD proof texts, you get a bee in your bonnet because you think your idea is valid. You won't accept an alternate view, so I don't think a specific answer will help if you reject my general assumptions based on principles and other verses. Your verses will not get you out of the Hezekiah pickle I brought up, etc.

 

[godrulz]

Good to see you, Dave. We enjoyed New York a year ago. Nice place to visit, but would not want to live there. It took me days to find any signs of Church/God. In the end, we found God at work and met believers doing the work of the ministry. I do regret not going to 'Shake Shack'.

 

[Jerry Shugart]

God experiences time; has a past, a present, and a future. The creation of the world is in God's past and the day of judgement is in his future.

There are many philosophers, theologians, and mystical gurus who have misconceived God as a “singularity” who is immovable and changeless, existing in a timeless and spaceless eternity. But, believing such a deity created the world, or can manifest itself into the world of movement, change, and spacetime, “contrary to it’s nature”, is an “irrational faith”.

Dave, let us look at the following verse:

"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Pet.3:8).

Of course we cannot take Peter's words literally but instead we can understand his words as meaning that God is not bound by time as we are. According to this there is a speeding up of time at the same time that there is a slowing down of time. Surely this thought can only be interpreted as meaning that God is timeless or outside of time.

Next, let us take a look at the following words spoken by the Lord Jesus:

"Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am" (Jn.8:58).

Arthur C. Custance wrote that "The subject of the conversation had been the patriarch Abraham. The Lord took Abraham's time as the pivot and spoke of two periods balanced on either side, namely, the ages which preceded Abraham, and all that followed (including the present). He then deliberately picked up the present and put it back before Abraham, but still referred to that distant period in the present tense. Though it was centuries ago, to Christ it was 'now.' Even if He were here today, He would still refer to the time before Abraham as the 'present' time. Why? Because He is God, and to God there is no passage of time, but all is 'present.' The reaction of the Jewish authorities to His statement suggests that in some strange way they had understood what He meant. The mystery of God's name, as revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:13,14--'the One who is existing always in the present'--is unlocked here and undoubtedly determined the Lord's choice of words in speaking to the Jews" (Arthur C. Custance, Time and Eternity, Chapter 4).

Sir Robert Anderson writes the following about "time":

"One of the most popular systems of metaphysics is based upon the fact that certain of our ideas seem to spring from the essential constitution of the mind itself ; and these are not subject to our reason, but, on the contrary, they control it. A superficial thinker might suppose the powers of human imagination to be boundless. He can imagine the sun and moon and stars to disappear from the heavens, and the peopled earth to vanish from beneath his feet, leaving him a solitary unit in boundless space ; but let him try, pursuing still further his madman's dream, to grasp the thought of space itself being annihilated, and his mind, in obedience to some inexorable law, will refuse the conception altogether. Or, to take an illustration apter for my present purpose, wild fancy may thus change the universe into a blank, but, though there should remain no shadow and no dial, no sequence of events, the mind is utterly incapable of imagining how time could cease to flow. And the practical conclusion we arrive at is that our idea of "past, present, and future," like that of space, is not derived from experience, but depends upon a law imposed upon our reason by the God who made us" (Anderson, The Gospel and Its Ministry, p. 77).

Anderson goes on to say that he appeals to the preceding idea "as a protest against the arrogance of limiting God by the standard of our own ignorance and frailty" (Ibid.).

In His grace,
Jerry

 

[Jerry Shugart]

The future is inherently unknowable as a certainty, even for an omniscient being, unless it is caused by God, not other free moral agents.

Then explain how the Lord Jesus knew that the following event would happen in the future?:

"Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the **** crow, thou shalt deny me thrice" (Mt.26:34).

I don't see the point about your verses, Jerry. They are not a problem for Open Theism. You have many more verses to deal with that will be a problem for your view.

You say that they are not a problem all the while refusing to answer my questions!

Let us say that the Lord was serious about what He said here:

"Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation" (Ex.32:10).

How could He consume them without completely destroying the tribe of Judah and therefore breaking the following promise which He had made earlier?:

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be" (Gen.49:10).

No problem for you but you still refuse to answer the question.

In His grace,
Jerry

 

[Nick M]

God repents. But he does not repent like a man, or change his mind on a whim, like a man might.

God experiences time; has a past, a present, and a future. The creation of the world is in God's past and the day of judgement is in his future.

Really? Then why does the Bible say he waits?

 

[godrulz]

Jn. 8:58 supports the eternality and self-existence of Christ/God. It does not mean that God/Christ is timeless nor eternal now. Every other page of Scripture shows God existing in an endless duration of time, not philosophical eternal now (time is an aspect of a personal being's existence since thinking, acting, feeling require duration/sequence/succession=time).

2 Peter 3:9 is about perspective and perception. It is a simile/figure of speech, not a philosophical or didactic statement about time vs eternity.

I was very surprised to see that International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (old gold standard; conservative; non-Open Theist) had an article on 'eternity' that rightly sees it as endless time (biblical), not timelessness (philosophical).

I dare you: http://www.revivaltheology.net/9_openness/change.html (God change mind?)

http://www.revivaltheology.net/9_openness/eternity.html (eternity of God) Anderson is not right about everything, so don't rely too much on him.

Ex. 32 actually supports Open Theism and is an e.g. of God changing His mind in response to changing contingencies. Commentaries and books on alleged discrepancies do mental gymnastics to retain strong immutability, but Open Theism can take it at face value since the future is not fatalistically fixed. God is responsive, not robotic.

God will fulfill His promises about Judah, Messiah, Kingdom. He can deal with a generation of rebels without negating the promise/lineage.

http://www.gregboyd.org/qa/open-theism/responses-to-objections/how-do-you-respond-to-genesis-4910/

I suspect you are going to dig up supposed problem verses from anti-Open Theism sources. This is an Open Theist response that I find satisfactory (there is a translation issue noted by non-Open Theists).

Just as you think a point for MAD or against Open Theism is the end all, I think that your views are more problematic than helpful. Consider all the relevant issues/arguments and don't get too hung up on one verse that we all must wrestle with given our paradigms.

 

[andyc]

Then explain how the Lord Jesus knew that the following event would happen in the future?:

"Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the **** crow, thou shalt deny me thrice" (Mt.26:34).

I used this example before with Lighthouse.
Open theists basically use determinism when they have no other choice. They maintain the free will of man until it becomes scripturally impossible, then they switch to determinism and imply that a bit of determinism on God's part isn't all bad.

 

[godrulz]

I used this example before with Lighthouse.
Open theists basically use determinism when they have no other choice. They maintain the free will of man until it becomes scripturally impossible, then they switch to determinism and imply that a bit of determinism on God's part isn't all bad.

http://www.gregboyd.org/qa/open-theism/responses-to-objections/how-do-you-respond-to-matthew-2636/ (one of the more common objections responded to in detail in many Open Theism books/articles)

There is a big difference between proximal, limited foreknowledge/probability and remote, exhaustive definite foreknowledge.

The problems with the closed view are greater than the surmountable objections to the Open view (most detractors really don't understand it, misrepresent it, attack straw men, assume Calvinism, etc.).

 

[andyc]

http://www.gregboyd.org/qa/open-theism/responses-to-objections/how-do-you-respond-to-matthew-2636/ (one of the more common objections responded to in detail in many Open Theism books/articles)

There is a big difference between proximal, limited foreknowledge/probability and remote, exhaustive definite foreknowledge.

The problems with the closed view are greater than the surmountable objections to the Open view (most detractors really don't understand it, misrepresent it, attack straw men, assume Calvinism, etc.).

In trying to understand open theism last year, what seems to be the ultimate goal within this view, is to try and maintain the free will of man. Of course, I am a firm believer in free will, but I don't need to rely on open theism to maintain it.

 

[Ask Mr. Religion]

I'm sorry but could someone please tell me what Open Theism is all about because the links and the discussion has left me baffled.

The short version:

1. God not only created the world ex nihilo but can (and at times does) intervene unilaterally in earthly affairs.
2. God chose to create mankind with incompatibilistic (libertarian) freedom—freedom over which He cannot exercise total control.
3. God so values freedom—the moral integrity of free creatures and a world in which such integrity is possible—that He does not normally override such freedom, even if He sees that it is producing undesirable results.
4. God always desires the highest good, both individually and corporately, and thus is affected by what happens in our lives.
5. God does not possess exhaustive foreknowledge of exactly how we will utilize our freedom, although He may at times be able to predict with great accuracy the choices we will freely make.
(Src: David Basinger in Pinnock’s The Openness of God)

The long version:

http://www.desiringgod.org/media/pdf/books_bbb/books_bbb.pdf

AMR

 

[Jerry Shugart]

Ex. 32 actually supports Open Theism and is an e.g. of God changing His mind in response to changing contingencies. Commentaries and books on alleged discrepancies do mental gymnastics to retain strong immutability, but Open Theism can take it at face value since the future is not fatalistically fixed. God is responsive, not robotic.

You conmtinue to EVADE the questions which I asked about! You do not want to face the facts so you just close your eyes and pretend that you have answered.

 

[chrysostom]

I'm sorry but could someone please tell me what Open Theism is all about because the links and the discussion has left me baffled.

I share your frustration
so
I would like to give you my take on all this

some think we know more about God
than
we know about ourselves
and
others believe we know more about ourselves

when what we think we know about God contradicts what we understand about ourselves our theology gets very complicated
and
defies logic