Time is relative. Do you believe that God is relative or absolute?
Paulos, there's a 5-year-old thread here at TOL stuck atop the BEL forum,
Is Time Relative or Absolute? Bob Argues that it's Absolute.
Colossians 2:8-9 does caution us to be careful, but I don't think Paul meant for us to discount "pagan Greek philosophy" entirely. I've posted some evidence that the New Testament itself reflects thoughts and ideas that undoubtedly originated with, or were influenced by, pagan Greek philosophy.
Let me reply with this from Battle Royale X
Post 10B:
The Holy Spirit filled the Bible with shadows, figures, types and antitypes, with the entire Old Covenant foreshadowing the New Covenant!, yet Sam argues that because the author of Hebrews indicates “that all before Christ was a shadow,” he “was influenced” and “impacted by Plato’s work” and the evidence he gives is that this “is precisely the meaning of the shadows in [Plato’s] allegory of the cave.” Meanwhile, the God of Abraham is the one who created shadows! God said “Let there be light,” and the light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. And Plato did not comprehend it, and for all the IQ he inherited from God’s creation of Adam, he was a wicked man with a darkened mind.
And Paulos, as to the appropriateness of the Christian infatuation with Plato, from
Post 5B of Battle Royale X:
Plato (B.C. 427–347): Plato had a high IQ, as do many who hate God and righteousness, and yet the Open View does not say that unbelievers are always wrong. Hollywood ends their blockbuster movies with the wicked punished, and the righteous vindicated, even though they hate themselves for it. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. So we can take an occasional illustration from Hollywood, and benefit from the scientific observations of atheists, but for Christians to allow Plato to influence their doctrine, as otherwise insightful Arminian Settled Viewers do, is downright foolishness. But what can it be called, other than the irony of the ages, when Sam with all five-point Calvinists who say they believe in Total Depravity, conform God’s Word to the influence of pagan Greek philosophy?
Plato by his darkened mind, gave the classic argument for immutability, arguing that God cannot change at all because God must be perfect, and any change could only be “for the worse [thus…] it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change…”
But he forgot to consider acorns. And perfect oceans, and perfect stars, and perfect newborn babies. For the Living God mirrored His own vitality in His creation. However by Augustine’s lifetime commitment to philosophy, he imposed Plato’s perspective on Christianity. But Augustine loved the guy, so perhaps he’s not so bad? Well, he will remind us why God despises paganism, by this glimpse into his Greek mind, from Plato’s Republic, Book VI. For Plato recommended a utopian state in which he would require for the philosophers and the soldiers:
that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent… [and] a woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the State, and continue to bear them until forty.”
But what if a teenager or a fortyish woman becomes pregnant? Plato has a delicate solution: just kill the baby. For if he became ruler (the wise philosopher king), Plato would allow childbirth:
“only to those who are within the specified age [with] strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be maintained, and arrange [that is: kill it] accordingly.
It is this same Plato of whom we read, by Augustine, City of God, Book VIII, Ch. 4:
But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly eclipsed them all… To Plato is given the praise of having perfected philosophy… We must, nevertheless, insert into our work certain of those opinions which he expresses in his writings, whether he himself uttered them, or narrates them as expressed by others, and seems himself to approve of,-opinions sometimes favorable to the true religion, which our faith takes up and defends, and sometimes contrary to it… Plato… is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles…
Sam, if the doctrine of exhaustive foreknowledge has developed directly from Christianity's mingling with pagan philosophy, then the force of the entire story of the Bible makes it abundantly clear that the future is open and both man and God change it continually
Paulos, the links to original sources is in the BR-X thread.
-Bob Enyart
I suppose I shouldn't expect an answer from you because no matter how you answer the question it would prove your point wrong.
