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Curt said:Quote:
Well, that's a very man sovereign idea of God's plan. I'm truly sorry that you feel that God is so impotent that He can't even bring His own desires to pass.
Mans leaning to his own understanding.
The truth is that God is so omnipotent that He can give man total freewill, stand the pain He experiences from those who will choose not to believe everything about Him, and suffer all the pain of their just sentance on Himself in substitution. It was His freewill choice to do it this way.
Shelb5 said:Very well said and hang in there.
Shelb5 said:But that is just the thing we aren?t depraved. We were not destroyed, we lost grace, fellowship and communion with God and sin entered the world so we are now influenced by it.
Does it make a whole lot of sense that God would have us receive the punishment and penalty of Adam when we bare NO personal guilt in the fall and not give us all a way of salvation? It is like me cutting off your legs with out your consent and condemning you for not being able to run. That is not a sovereign God, that is a sicko God that you describe.
And you also can not have it both ways; either you are born dead in sin spiritually dead and corrupt or your not. Where does this leave babies and mentally handicapped? Their dead, they can?t be both dead and not culpable of sin under your paradigm all at the same time. You would either have to condemn them or change you stand that we are all born corrupt if you believe God gives them salvtion.
daphndon said:Sorry, I don't agree with any of that. My beliefs are quite different from yours. But God bless you anyway.
Shelb5 said:Our beliefs aren?t that different. We just view things differently.
We believe that those who are born again and who persevere til the end are sheep and the elect, we believe that God chooses us, us not him and we are incapable of response unless God grants us grace to do so.
We believe many of the same things, but I don?t believe in putting God in a box limiting his power by saying that he isn?t sovereign just because someone has the freedom givien them by God to reject the gift of faith.
Reformationist said:If you mean "do we freely make the choices we make according to our nature and those choices are not forced by God" then yes, we freely make choices. However, man is never completely "free." In his unregenerate state he longs ONLY to do the will of his father, satan. So, that's what he does.
Reformationist said:LOL! "So omnipotent that He can give man total freewill?" That is a complete oxymoron. If God has all power then man is not autonomous.
da Unamano said:Because omnipotent does not mean "exercises total power" but actually means "has the power to do anything".
de Unamuno said:Don, your example does not seem to allow for real free will of any kind. Maybe a kind of will, but certainly not a free will if that will is ultimately limited by a nature which he did not decide.
So the poor guy may decide left, right, up or down, but he has no ability to really accept God or reject Him on his own volition.
Merely by virtue of the poor b******'s own (unrequested/unwilled) creation, God's will was imposed upon him that he should never accept him. God created a man specifically to burn in Hell. He is omnipotent, so he could have NOT created the little guy. But instead he chose to create him for the specific purpose of rotting in the eternal garbage disposal?
You could argue that he didn't directly create the dude, but that he was simply decended from other sinners. But then God is still responsible for the first sinner in the chain of sinners. So he is responsible for ALL sinners that result from the first, and including the first, because NONE of them chose to be created.
I see that the ability to decide Coke or Diet Coke is really very gracious, but isn't it a more grevious action to cap our free will at whether or not we want to cook in the everlasting barbeque? I'm kidding... ok, I'm not kidding.
A lot of these arguments seem to rely on God's omnipotence and his unwillingness to allow his creation to freely accept or freely reject him. Surely an omnipotent being can allow anything. Why can he not allow his creation to freely choose him? If you argue he cannot allow this, then he is truly not omnipotent. Because omnipotent does not mean "exercises total power" but actually means "has the power to do anything". If he cannot allow free will, then he is not omnipotent because he lacks the power to allow free will. However, if you would argue that he could allow free will, but that he can't bear the rejection, not only do you have to prove why he simply can't handle rejection, but even if you could, then he is still not omnipotent.
I would propose that an omnipotent God could allow free will because, although he "has the power to do anything" (included in that is the power to create free will beings) he chooses to restrain himself so that those beings could freely choose or deny him. Because he is omnipotent, the rejection hurts, but it is still his will, and he can still claim omnipotence.
So you will say, "why would God create a plan that is surely going to result in his rejection and disappointment"? The answer, I would propose, is that God is also pure love. The only fathomable reason for creating the universe is to share in that love.
I welcome other theories here. But let's assume mine is right for now. God created man to share in that love, but to truly share it, one must choose that love freely. Otherwise, it is, at best, a form of egotistical worship, but cannot be a true gift of self. So, according to this plan, His goal is to have a human (not all, not most, not even many), as a separate entity from himself, to choose his love and reciprocate. Obviously a great many loving humans is nice, but one human, acting of totally free will to love God, is glorious enough to justify all of creation. Is it not?
The next area I see logic failing is that the plan didn't fail. You would ask, "Why would God execute a plan only to see it fail?" The answer is free will. Free will, together with God's self-restraint to allow free will, is the wild card in the deck. When I say "wild card", I mean that God can anticipate our choices, plan according to those choices to create any desired outcome, but he chooses to allow (or, possible, to sometimes prohibit) us to make those choices, even if they are choices against him. Again, he is in total control. Fully omnipotent. His goal is to make a truly loving person. You cannot create one person with true free will and realistically expect them to choose you. You have to build a bigger story with room enough (physical and temporal) in it to give all people a chance.
However, he knows the plan in its entirety. He knew eons before Adam ever existed that Adam would reject Him. He also knew about Jesus, and Don and Michael Jackson. He knew that his creation, with the gift of free will, would necessarily reject his gift. Why else would he set up Adam with those stupid trees just mocking the poor kidSurely in his omniscience he knew what would happen, but yet he created the world anyway.
He created a world destined to fall because he built the world to rise again.
Either that, or he is one sadistic dude. You cannot offer free will and expect everything to be ok. Humanity has to learn for themselves why we would choose him or reject him. The story is not over, and it seems you have already closed the book.
Are we really doing this again?!
Blessings,
-jerrod
Reformationist said:Trust me, your beliefs are very different.
Sure, we share that in common. However, those generalizations are where the commonality ends. You see, we (daphndon and I) believe that those who persevere until the end do so because they're the sheep and the elect. We believe that God chooses us according to His own purpose in election. You have regularly acknowledged that you believe God elects us unto salvation based on His omniscient ability to see the choice that we make. And last, but most certainly not least, we believe that when God grants us the grace to respond in faith we do respond in faith. We also believe that God continues to grace us with salvitic faith and preserves us from losing that salvation.
So, from a cursory inspection it may appear that Catholics Christians and reformed Christians share many points of doctrine but a deeper study will show clearly that these doctrines are not similar at all.
Michelle, we don't "limit His power" either. This is ad hominem as well as innaccurate.
We acknowledge that God's purpose, NOT POWER, is limited. The problem, as I see it, is that you'd rather believe that God wants something to come to pass but doesn't ensure that it does just so you can protect your precious "free will." I have never understood why God would do such a thing, especially in light of the fact that Scripture indicates that God accomplishes ALL His holy will:
Numbers 23:19
"God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent.
Has He said, and will He not do?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?
Even if your theory made sense, do you honestly believe it is more important to God that you have the ability to make an autonomous choice and very likely burn in hell because of that freedom than to ensure that those whom He loves so desparately and created in His image are with Him?
Not only is the concept of God not accomplishing His will contrary to all of Scripture, it doesn't even make sense. Why would a sovereign, holy, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, merciful, righteous Judge and Creator who, IN ALL THINGS, seeks first HIS OWN glory set Himself up for disappointment?
Shelb5 said:They are different yes, but not much as you think. That is the problem, you want to believe they are different but they aren't so much that they couldn't be reconciled.
And that is the core difference, Don. The beliefs are one of free will and irresistible grace.
BTW, where does your come from?
Ask Adam and Eve.
How does this somehow make free will incorrect? This does not show that He took freedom away. Where is THAT verse, that?s the one I am looking for.
If His will is for us to accept the gift of salvation freely how is he not accomplishing that? How is He being disappointed?
Can you explain to me why God would only be a success if he CREATED some for the sole purpose of watching them be ****** to say he is glory?
Can you explain this to me? Is God in a box? Is he limited on what he can and can?t do?
de Unamuno said:Reformationist,
I see you're point. We disagree as to the nature of God.
It seems the Predestinationalist (word?) view denies some of the basic tenets of my theology. Keep in mind that my theology is not totally reliant on scripture, so I am somewhat immune to your kryptonite versus:
1) God, in Trinitarian form, exists as a perfect, self-contained entity of love. It is from that love, not an unfathomable or suspect wrath, that He created man.
2) He created man with true free will, meaning man retains the capacity to choose God or to not choose God... or in a broader (but lesser) sense, to choose God's morality (this leaves at least some hope for non-Christians, for example), but a Catholic would never claim guaranteed salvation for himself, let alone a non-Christian.
3) God is omnipotent, and is not hindered by man's free will, but allows it and is glorified by it.
The context of Romans 9 is that Paul needed to assuage the fears of the gentiles that God's chosen people, the Jews, were not saved per God's original promise to them. This seemingly unkept promise threatened even the gentiles who claimed to believe in God but seemed to have no guarantees of salvation. That is the prime motivator for Chapter 9. Not to support a false claim to total and absolute divine predestination, but to point out that God, in his omnipotence, had the power to lift some up and to push some down in order to show example (e.g. Pharaoh). He does not say "all", nor should the chapter be interpreted in such a way. By Paul's saying we cannot choose God, he is talking about having the ability to choose to accept or reject him, the gift of free will. God, through his mercy, must first grant us that gift to choose, or he revokes it to make special points. It is not a two bucket scenario of people he damns or people he saves.
He grants blessing to us, to the vast majority of us that he doesn't need to use for an example, to be able to choose him.
That doesn't me we have to choose him
and in the context of the rest of Romans (and the rest of the Bible), it is painfully clear that we can choose to enter into his church by our own volition.
He simply turns off that right for some
but nevertheless, Paul says that he still "has endured with much patience" with his vessels of wrath.
In my Catholic opinion, you are reading the scriptures as someone who cannot see time from God's perspective. God knows who will choose him and who will turn away from him well before that person exists, yet he still allows that person to be made. That carries a certain tone of predestination, and in that sense actually implies that you will do exactly what you were made to do, but it is entirely different than Calven's theory in that an act of will that God foresaw is still allowed at some point in the person's life.
Reformationist said:I would agree with this. I do have one question though. If man's will must be allowed to be free then it's not really completely free, wouldn't you say? You don't believe that man's will is autonomous, do you? It's still subject to God, right?
Let me get this straight. In the first section (vv. 1-5) Paul is lamenting the fact that his countrymen "according to the flesh," i.e., the Israelites, God's covenant people, "to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises" have rejected the Savior. Are we okay at this point?
...There's one glaring problem with this view. If God was desiring to show the world that His plan is according to His own purpose in electing and setting apart a people for Himself then it cannot be based on Jacob's actions, at any point in time.
Romans 9:14,15
What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion."
Clearly, the ONLY way that his anticipated objection makes any sense, whatsoever, is if vv. 10-13 mean that God chose Jacob based NOT on Jacob's forseen actions but, rather, upon the divine purpose of God in election.
If I understand you correctly you're saying that God's entire purpose in blessing us is so that we are able to choose Him? Did God do nothing to ensure that we would choose Him? If not, was there the possibility, since all had the ability to reject Him, that all would reject Him? Or is it mere luck that we didn't all reject Him and make the entire plan of God a waste of His divine effort?
Here's the thing de Unamuno, if we reduce God's plan to merely something that enables us to be saved but does not ensure that we are saved then you must admit that two possibilities were viable. First, that everyone would accept Him as Lord and Savior and be saved and, second, that no one would. Do you concede either of those possibilities?
But I don't deny that we choose to enter His church by our own volition. However, I am curious what you attribute as the reason that some choose to willingly enter into servitude to the Lord and some reject it. Any opinions?
So you don't disagree with God's omnipotent reprobation, you just feel that it's not a universal execution of His sovereign power. Is that what you're saying.
As I said to Michelle, the point of contention between our views is NOT whether God allows for an act of our will but, rather, what it is that determines what that act will be. If one views unregenerate man as morally capable of submitting to God then it logically follows that God would base His choice of someone on their freely willed action. Aside from the fact that this makes God's entire plan contingent upon the will of man rather than on the merciful grace of God, it also does violence to much of Scripture.
Think of my ealier example of Jacob and Esau. Common Jewish custom was that the older son, in this case Esau, would inherit all the blessings by virtue of his station as the oldest son of his father. Now, God's plan certainly included the freely willed actions of Esau in selling his birthright, that I do not deny. However, just because Esau's action of selling his birthright for a bowl of soup ushers in God's sovereign plan of election in choosing Jacob over Esau as the recipient of His blessings doesn't mean that that freely willed action of Esau's wasn't in perfect accordance with God's eternal plan. God's plan wasn't based upon the actions of His creation. On the contrary, our actions are in accordance with His plan because it is His effectual grace that providentially manifests His plan.
de Unamuno said:Certainly our gift of free will is only truly free if we have unlimited ability to choose.
Free will is part of the nature God created us with, and is dependent on him to exist, but is not affected by his will after that. So the existence of will is dependent on God, but the will itself is truly free of God.
We are.
Not true. God wants to show the world an example.
God knows that Jacob's actions will facilitate that perfect situation.
God knew Jacob's place in the story from the moment he created the universe.
That doesn't detract from Jacob's free will at any point, rather Jacob's choices make him an integral part of God's story.
Again, not true. Jacob's act of will and God's reaction to that volition, are simply two separate tools (like a hammer and a nail) that God uses to tell his story. The "anticipated objection" comes from people who look at God's plan just like you are looking at it, not as a perfect act of thought and plan (independent of time), but as a linear sequence of events in human chronology... so man-centric of you, DonGod does not see the world in that way, and Paul is trying to express the metaphysical to these people.
Reformationist said:Our views can never be reconciled because they are different. The only way to reconcile them is to change them. Now, you and I may be reconciled but different views cannot be reconciled without changes.
Well, you're certainly free to believe that's the core difference. I think it goes a bit deeper than that myself.
Where does my premise come from? I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you asking why I believe what I believe?
Wow. That's deep Michelle. What exactly should I ask Adam and Eve?
Michelle, as usual this is becoming quite tedious. Why must it always be about you?
I posted those verses because they focus on the sovereignty of God. It wasn't about the freedom of man.
The verses clearly point out that God accomplishes all His holy will and that none will stay His hand. Therefore, if He stays His hand it's not because of the counsel of His creation but because it was according to His divine purpose in election.
Come on Michelle. You have said, numerous times, that God is disappointed because so many of the people He so desparately loves reject Him and burn in hell.
Are you denying that now?
Look, if God equally desires the salvation of all mankind and some people reject Him don't you think that He is disappointed? Or do you think He stops loving someone after they reject Him?
I never said that is anyone's sole purpose nor did I say that's the only way God would be a success so what's your point?
Yes God is limited on what He can and can't do but, regardless, you have, once again, missed the forest for the trees. My position is NOT that God is limited in what He can and cannot do but rather in what He does do.
Reformationist said:jerrod, I am literally shocked at the change in your approach to the Gospel. I am not even sure how to continue this. I'd hate to do something to offend you, especially after so many wonderful exchanges. In light of that I am not sure I should continue. I think your posts have become the Catholic token response to the Gospel that His plan hinges on man's actions.
Reformationist said:jerrod, I am literally shocked at the change in your approach to the Gospel. I am not even sure how to continue this. I'd hate to do something to offend you, especially after so many wonderful exchanges. In light of that I am not sure I should continue. I think your posts have become the Catholic token response to the Gospel that His plan hinges on man's actions.
we just don't believe that God creates someone with express purpose of burning them in Hell forever, and then expects to be called a loving God.
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