At 5:50 PM, Vaquero45 said…
Quoted from Strawbridge, in Gene Cook's post:
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The correct view seems to be that God is the ultimate cause of sin, but He is not the positive cause of sin. Therefore, He cannot be blamed for sin. In other words, God causes sin by withholding goodness, rather than by injecting evil. God does not produce the sin in people's hearts. Rather, it proceeds from their own hearts. God simply withholds the grace that would change the hearts, and thus is the ultimate cause but not the positive, or morally guilty, cause.
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The above is quoted from Gene's Strawbridge article posted earlier. The part I emboldened shows the slight of hand employed to throw off one argument Open Theists make.
OV'ers (of which I am one) insist God is not the author of sin. In the settled view God must indeed be the author of sin.
Strawbridge obfuscates by saying, "he is the ultimate cause, but not the positive cause". And again, in a nutshell, Rather, it (sin) proceeds from their own hearts.
And the method God employs...
"God causes sin by withholding goodness" - Strawbridge
That clears it up???
That doesn't explain where the evil in their hearts came from. If it cannot be the free will of man that conceived the evil, as Strawbridge and Gene Cook would affirm, (correct me if I'm wrong) the evil must have came from God. If God has the only true operational will in existence, then the evil that exists is by his will alone, therefore God is indeed the author of sin in the settled view. Can something that has no will author something? Either God authored it or nobody did. (in the settled view)
Again I quote Strawbridge:
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"This brings us to the distinction between God's moral will and His sovereign will. God's moral will is what He wants in and of itself.... (snip)
God's sovereign will, on the other hand, is what He brings to pass in history."
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At some point the settled view God had to plan all evil, that He supposedly brings to pass in history. In doing so He would have to violate His "moral will", making him not only the author of evil, but evil by His own definition.
