Clete I agree with a lot of points you made in your last. I have no ties to Rome and know absolutely no creeds at all. I hear them mentioned sometimes and am curious about what heidlborg, westminister, and the apostles creed are. But I too believe the Bible is our only guide to what God wants us to learn, and how we should live, ect. If any creed disagrees with scripture i would have no problem throwing the creed in the trash as profane. If GOD was interested in us learning creeds he would have put some in the Bible. I agree God is way more loving than these reformed calvinist can grasp. If he was some micromanaging God who is behind all evil and terrible sex crimes and murder, ect. He would not have sent his Son to die on the cross for us. That image of God seems cold and impersonal, and would give us no reason to pray to him because his will is settled and even he cannot change his decree. That is blasphemy as far as im concerned. God could have saved the Son on the cross with an army of anfavoif he wanted to. My God can do anything he pleases. Change his mind when Nineveh repents. Send down fire to annihilate Sodom. He can cast Israel aside for unbelief and stiff necks and save us gentiles by grace through faith without works. And he could slap an enemy of Christians down on the way to damacus and make him our apostle and change his name to Paul while he switches gears and save a people with no promises of history to expect anything so glorious as unmerited favor and being grafted in to the natural tree.
Everything up to this point in your post was excellent!
My God is all knowing and all powerful but also our heavenly Father who loves us and wants us to do good and walk as children of the light.being longsuffering and patient giving even the worst of us chances to repent. Why do you think God cant know how everything will turn out because he already seen the consumation of all things. But gave us freewill and didnt force or control us to be robots with no will of our own. while making us do terribly evil crimes we couldnt change if we wanted to. I see no problem with God knowing everything but allowing us to exercise our own wills so we can choose evil or good. God would just be an observer then not the cause of all evil or the reason we go to hell by his decree.
The reason why I think God can't know everything is because the notion is both unbiblical and irrational. Either would kill the doctrine.
As I mentioned earlier, if you want to have a rationally coherent doctrine, you cannot simply drop some doctrines while holding on to others for no other reason than because you like some and you dislike others. A point that I'm sure you agree with or else you'd have never come this far. I mentioned also that it the bottom line difference between the Open and Settled Views has to do with what is referred to as Theology Proper. Our theology of who God is the foundation of the rest of our whole doctrine and one is in fact forced to choose between whether God is living, personal, relational, loving and just or is He omnibig, omniknowing, omnipowerful, etc. You cannot have it both ways and maintain a rational theology, you have to choose (which is deliciously ironic given that the Settled View denies that you have the ability to choose). Incidentally, Nang is perhaps the best person imaginable to demonstrate this inability to rationally have it both ways. Her posts are a nearly never ending stream of double talk and contradiction such that one wonders how a living human mind can produce it while maintaining the ability to communicate it at all.
So, why do I say that the idea that God infallibly knows everything in advance is both irrational and unbiblical?
I'll start with the irrational part first.
You seem to understand that the concept of love is a key component of the Christian faith and it is no accident that the idea that God is loving is one of the key attributes of God for the Open View. Love is an act that only a free will can perform. In order to love, one must be free to choose. If a person stays with you because they love you, it means that they could leave but have chosen to stay. Without the ability to freely leave, staying is meaningless. No action is moral if the action cannot be avoided, if there is no alternative, no ability to do or to do otherwise. This is called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. And, as I presented in a previous post, if God infallibly knows everything in advance you have no free will....
T = You will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am.
- Yesterday God infallibly believed T. [Supposition of infallible foreknowledge]
- If E occurred in the past, it is now-necessary that E occurred then. [Principle of the Necessity of the Past]
- It is now-necessary that yesterday God believed T. [1, 2]
- Necessarily, if yesterday God believed T, then T. [Definition of “infallibility”]
- If p is now-necessary, and necessarily (p → q), then q is now-necessary. [Transfer of Necessity Principle]
- So it is now-necessary that T. [3,4,5]
- If it is now-necessary that T, then you cannot do otherwise than answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am. [Definition of “necessary”]
- Therefore, you cannot do otherwise than answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am. [6, 7]
- If you cannot do otherwise when you do an act, you do not act freely. [Principle of Alternate Possibilities]
- Therefore, when you answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am, you will not do it freely. [8, 9]
Source
I present that argument in the form of a syllogism on purpose. In order to deny the conclusion, one must demonstrate that the line of thinking is fallacious or that one or more of the premises are false. I've been debating this issue for very many years now. To date, I've never seen anyone even make an attempt to do either. The logic is quite inescapable. What Calvinists do instead of refuting the logic is to undermine logic itself. I have no doubt that such will be attempted on this thread as well, if it hasn't already been (I don't read every single post).
So, we are left with the following...
- Christianity is true. (Heretofore an unstated presupposition)
- Love is a necessary condition for the Christian faith. (Not in dispute (even by the Calvinists))
- Love is a choice. (Definition of Love)
- If God infallibly knows everything in advance we cannot choose. [Established in argument above]
- Therefore, if God infallibly knows everything in advance, we cannot love. [3 & 4]
- Therefore, if God infallibly knows everything in advance, Christianity is false. [2 & 5] (Definition of "necessary condition")
- Therefore, God does not infallibly know everything in advance. [1 & 6]
So that settles the rational argument but does the bible agree? If not, we Christians have a big problem. If the bible does not agree with reason then why bother basing our doctrine on it? If reason can be discarded then there is no way to declare any doctrine false. Without reason we may as well worship the sun and moon and stars and burn poppy seeds for incense and chant and moan our way to the grave because no one could tell us that we were wrong for doing so.
The difficulty here is the format. This is an internet forum and this post is already past long enough to ensure that almost no one will read it all and so I'm not going to make an attempt to make a drawn out biblical argument. What I'm going to do instead is to break one of my own rules and just give you a list of texts to read. I generally avoid proof-texting for two reasons. First of all, I've learned over the years that it just doesn't work but secondly, and just as importantly, its usually not a rationally sound way to make an argument. With scripture, as with any text, context is everything and proof-texting, as a general rule, ignores the context entirely. And a third difficulty lies in the fact that I'm attempting to prove a negative. It really should be the Settled View's burden to prove that God does infallibly know everything in advance rather than my burden to prove that He does not. So, having said that, bare in mind that I am fully aware of such issues and have decided to present what follows in the hopes the you will spend the requisite time and effort reading through these verses that is required to make such a list of any value.
God did not know what Adam would name the animals...
Genesis 2:19 Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name.
God did not know in advance whether Abraham would sacrifice is son...
Genesis 22:11 But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”
So he said, “Here I am.”
12 And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
God speaks in terms of alternative possibilities...
Exodus 4:1 Then Moses answered and said, “But suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice; suppose they say, ‘The Lord has not appeared to you.’”
2 So the Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?”
He said, “A rod.”
3 And He said, “Cast it on the ground.” So he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand), 5 “that they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”
6 Furthermore the Lord said to him, “Now put your hand in your bosom.” And he put his hand in his bosom, and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous, like snow. 7 And He said, “Put your hand in your bosom again.” So he put his hand in his bosom again, and drew it out of his bosom, and behold, it was restored like his other flesh. 8 “Then it will be, if they do not believe you, nor heed the message of the first sign, that they may believe the message of the latter sign. 9 And it shall be, if they do not believe even these two signs, or listen to your voice, that you shall take water from the river[a] and pour it on the dry land. The water which you take from the river will become blood on the dry land.”
God has to perform a test to see if Israel will obey...
Exodus 16:4 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not.
God promises the land to those in the exodus and then does not give it to them...
Deuteronomy 1:8 See, I have set the land before you; go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to your fathers—to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—to give to them and their descendants after them.’
34 “And the Lord heard the sound of your words, and was angry, and took an oath, saying, 35 ‘Surely not one of these men of this evil generation shall see that good land of which I swore to give to your fathers, 36 except Caleb the son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him and his children I am giving the land on which he walked, because he wholly followed the Lord.’ 37 The Lord was also angry with me for your sakes, saying, ‘Even you shall not go in there. 38 Joshua the son of Nun, who stands before you, he shall go in there. Encourage him, for he shall cause Israel to inherit it.
God gives Israel a CHOICE...
Deuteronomy 11:26 “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse: 27 the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today; 28 and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you today, to go after other gods which you have not known.
God explicitly states that He had no idea that people would burn their own children in worship of a god that doesn't even exist...
Jeremiah 32:35 And they built the high places of Baal which are in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I did not command them, nor did it come into My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.’ (stated also in Jeremiah 19)
Okay, so that plenty of that. There are several dozen such passages that I could quote but that should be more than sufficient to at least prove that I'm not just making empty claims about what the bible teaches.
Resting in Him,
Clete
