Does open theism imply that God could ultimately lose the cosmic struggle?

Lazy_Pink_Nights

New Member
Aug 13, 2016
3
4
26
Belgium
✟15,243.00
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
In Relationship
If God experiences time in much the same way we do, and if he doesn't have complete foreknowledge of all that will come to pass, and if the enemy's machinations can take him by surprise, doesn't it follow that in the end he may not be victorious?

I'm curious to know where you found the idea that God experiences time in much the same way we do - this really isn't true. First thing you have to understand is God is an Infinite being. The beginning and the end. We are finite beings with finite minds, to comprehend God in all of being is simply impossible. How does a circle fully view a sphere is something we must ask ourselves. It's simply cannot as it is 2 dimensional whereas a sphere is 3 dimensional. When Genesis says that God created the earth in 6 days, it is literal. God put had it put in a way that we could understand better (even though as finite beings we just can't comprehend it fully). Just as God sent His begotten Son to walk among us - to be able to more easily relate to Him. Now see, God does have foreknowledge of the time that will come to pass. A good quote out there is "To try and understand the Trinity you lose your mind, to deny it, you lose your soul". The "war" during the end times is actually not a war but a carried out death sentence. He told us exactly what was going to happen and we made the decision to allow it and turn from Him. 1 Peter 5:8 "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." The devil has never been to Hell, see currently Hell is for the demons and for those who chose to turn from Jesus. As Jesus being the only way to heaven - in turning from Him you agree to not spend eternity with Him. Hell is His final act of mercy and His final act of judgement on Lucifer as currently - Lucifer is on death row. The enemy also is not able to take God by surprise. I have no idea where you got that information either and it is a little scary that people believe that.
 
Upvote 0

Stillicidia

Revanche Flower
Supporter
Apr 22, 2016
919
233
Mystic Meadows
✟11,021.00
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
Celibate
Politics
US-Constitution
If God experiences time in much the same way we do, and if he doesn't have complete foreknowledge of all that will come to pass, and if the enemy's machinations can take him by surprise, doesn't it follow that in the end he may not be victorious?

God doesn't experience time the same way we do, 1000 years to our day. He has seen everything from the beginning. He tells you he beats satan, and so you shouldn't really worry about satan winning.
 
Upvote 0

Berean777

Servant of Christ Jesus. Stellar Son.
Feb 12, 2014
3,283
586
✟14,509.00
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Private
God doesn't experience animate objects or universal constants or time itself. God looks at time as it never existed, that is at a standstill. What God experiences is himself.

To some people, this may be absurd. But please consider this......

Within God exists three personalities that are coeternal and coequal and his eternal love is expressed through his Son who he brought into his creation before the first bit of matter appeared and before time existed.

What God experiences is through the interactions of his Son. Scripture declares that God was pierced and that they did to him all those things that they did to the Son. The experiences of God are therefore tangible experiences of his being within his own creation as the Emmanuel.

Off course everything that God said he has done have been through experiences of the Son. It therefore follows that God is timeless and he logs all his experiences and tangible interactions that surpass time and space. That is why many authors would write......

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5)

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love (Ephesians 1:4)


God therefore considers time as a stand still from the point of.......

God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. (Romans 4:17)

It seems that God has created a time loop, in much the same way one turns the cog on a toy that turns around in a pre-determined fashion. So God doesn't pay attention to time, but what he EXPECTS to experience in that timeless moment. 1000 years to God is still living in that moment and to him we existed then as we exist today in the flesh.

How this interprets according to our human knowledge is that God experiences us without consideration to time or matter. So the question is why create soul beings in his own image?

The concept of pleasure coupled with pain becomes the algorithm and that is why women have labor pains through the creation of another human being and God compares his enduring pain for humanity as labor pains.

This, believe it or not tells us alot about our creator. That is our God has created a model of pain with pleasure. Even the Christian way of life is not without its pains before the joys of blessings. We therefore can only equate this phenomenon to an infinite being who places himself at the centre of what started it all and in doing so must be certain of what he requires and therefore may know what unfolds regardless of time and space. God will get his experiences with man and his eternal enduring qualities to pain is why he is Love. Love begets love. So the epic love story within the one being between the Father and the Son is what initiated the Genesis account, where it was declared LET US CREATE MAN IN OUR OWN IMAGE. This would allow God to experience man as if he was a man. So God became man for those faithful 33 years during the time of Jesus of Nazareth and the persona of the Son allowed God to interact with man and to lead us from time to eternity to the Father of time.

That is why Jesus would say.......

3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. 4And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

5Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? 6Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

7If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. (John 14:2-7)

We see an open invitation from the Son to heaven. God created time and space for humanity as a journey for we are cosmic travelers who will travel from time and space to eternity to be with our Lord and so time and space was really created for us so that the Son can come and show us the way to the Father.

So the entire history of humanity was already written by the author who is our creator. God would have been well aware of what he wrote and how it plays out. That is why books are mentioned in Revelation of John, for these books were written before the inception of time and space and Jesus would say.....

Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

In the flood story God said......

6And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart

Notice God was sorry that he made man to achieve what he expected because of the expected losses of his harvest. He grieving at his heart is to say that he didn't take it lightly in the same way a farmer plants crops and the yield from the harvest is all but destroyed. So God made himself accountable in the same way a farmer would make himself accountable for loss of seasonal crops.

It therefore follows that God already has taken into account losses and through the process of pain before the joy has declared....

Many are called but yet few chosen

We therefore conclude that the author of the book of life knew all along what would unfold and that time and space was really for our benefit in order to find the way and complete our travels from time to timeless eternity. We are being invited to the timeless nexus of God.

God is all knowing and we ought to hope that we are written in the book of life. If we are not then there is really nothing we can do. In this replayed movie called life what is destined to happen will happen and there is nothing we can do to change it. Our characters are already destined in God's script. If those who perished in Noah's flood were none the wiser, then their destiny was already scripted.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Jul 24, 2016
12
6
Nigeria
✟7,662.00
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Single
The suggestion - however academic it might be - that God could "lose" any struggle is absolutely implausible to me, and is not something I consider easy to debate about under any guise whatsoever.

My sincere apologies to open theists, but I think their postulations about God's 'conditional omniscience' is baseless and provocatively unchristian, at least based on my understanding of what the Bible teaches.

The God that I know and worship is infinitely omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient! And to be sure, He never loses any struggle, cosmic or otherwise.
 
Upvote 0

VanillaSunflowers

Black Lives Don't Matter More Than Any Other Life
Jul 26, 2016
3,741
1,733
DE
✟18,570.00
Faith
Nazarene
Marital Status
Married
The suggestion - however academic it might be - that God could "lose" any struggle is absolutely implausible to me, and is not something I consider easy to debate about under any guise whatsoever.

My sincere apologies to open theists, but I think their postulations about God's 'conditional omniscience' is baseless and provocatively unchristian, at least based on my understanding of what the Bible teaches.

The God that I know and worship is infinitely omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient! And to be sure, He never loses any struggle, cosmic or otherwise.
Welcome to the forums. Very well stated.
Open theism isn't supportable by the scriptures in my opinion. It purports to teach there is something God cannot do, cannot know, and that he can be defeated by the enemy Angel that he gave life to in the beginning. Let to live for God's own purpose, and then prophesied through the only Apostle that survived persecution, John the Revelator, will be overcome in the end , chained for a thousand years, and then in the end destroyed utterly.

Open theism hopes to teach that that's all a myth and Satan could surprise us. Because God for all that means when we think of creator and eternal power can choose to lose his own game.
 
Upvote 0

Widlast

Well-Known Member
Feb 11, 2016
837
653
63
Eastern USA
✟35,523.00
Faith
Catholic
Marital Status
Married
If God experiences time in much the same way we do, and if he doesn't have complete foreknowledge of all that will come to pass, and if the enemy's machinations can take him by surprise (these are my characterizations of a doctrine called open theism -- which IS A DOCTRINE I DO NOT HOLD MYSELF), doesn't it follow that in the end he may not be victorious?
Why do you care what heretics think? God DOES NOT experience time as we do, He DOES HAVE complete knowledge of all past and future, and the idea that a bunch of His creations could beat Him in any contest is patently ridiculous.
 
Upvote 0

Greenham

Saint and Sinner
Sep 11, 2013
48
3
✟8,657.00
Faith
Presbyterian
Marital Status
Private
Politics
US-Others
Why do you care what heretics think?

1. If you don't know the arguments of false teachers, you can't warn others against them as effectively.
2. If you don't understand what deluded people believe, you can't bring them back to the truth as easily.
3. If you don't know what a group is teaching, you can easily mischaracterize their teachings and classify teachings as false even when they're not. It's important to know which teachings are dangerous and which are not, even within the same group.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0

Razare

God gave me a throne
Nov 20, 2014
1,050
394
✟10,847.00
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Private
It's not possible, unless God chooses to sin.

Dominion to judge everything, was never given to Adam or satan. God maintained that power and dominion. God is not obligated to give it to anyone. Nor has God said he will give it to anyone, except to his Son Jesus. Jesus then judges.

So the only way it fails is if God sins, but God does not sin. So there is no cosmic struggle. That is basically a lie.

There is a struggle where men yield to sin, but God is not a participant in sin. Nor is God subjected to our sins.

Jesus Christ already defeated the dominion of satan on the cross, all of satan's power today is based on lies.

and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. - John 16:11

Authority over creation was given back to Christ, and taken from satan's hand. Dominion had been given to Adam, who lost it by sin to satan. Christ took it back. But this was never a precarious situation because Christ was always perfect and the word of God cannot change.
 
Upvote 0

Shempster

ImJustMe
Supporter
Dec 28, 2014
1,560
786
✟258,881.00
Country
United States
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
Married
There are a couple of ways to look at this.
The word says He WILL be victorious, so we have to start with that.
I had always had the question "If the vast majority of souls burn in hell forever, how does that make God victorious?"
In the end, the wicked will not bother anything or anyone in the new heavens and earth. I suspect it is because they have been annihilated. This could give the impression that good won out in the end, but will God wipe His own memory clean as well?
Could He?
If not, He will either see the wicked suffering (if hell exists) or He will have the memory of them forever as His children that He lost.? Could He be victorious with them in His mind?
Or could it be that in some distant place after much rehabilitation that ALL of His creation will once again turn their hearts towards the creator and be forever again reunited?
I like the last option, but after years of intense study, I simply cannot settle on any one scenario.
 
Upvote 0
This site stays free and accessible to all because of donations from people like you.
Consider making a one-time or monthly donation. We appreciate your support!
- Dan Doughty and Team Christian Forums

stephen583

Well-Known Member
Jan 12, 2016
2,202
913
66
Salt lake City, UT
✟24,201.00
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Single
Merriam-Webster, (Anthropomorphism) (1). The act of assigning human attributes, traits, emotions and intentions to a deity.

The entire premise of this thread is flawed. It proposes to assign human attributes to God, and then tries to judge God's motives on the basis of human understanding, which is totally unbiblical. As has been pointed out in various posts in this thread already, God IS NOT human. He is omnipresent (existing in all times simultaneously), and he is omniscient as well (all knowing). The distinctive difference between man and God is clearly stated in Scripture.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (ISAIAH 55:8-9).

God has already seen the outcome, and Satan doesn't WIN. We don't have to understand the plan, or be able to explain it to others. That's where "faith" and a "belief" in God enters into it. Good luck trying to figure out what God's motives and intentions are, but ultimately, I think it's just an exercise in futility.
 
Upvote 0

bottomofsandal

Well-Known Member
Mar 10, 2012
1,966
306
America
✟11,113.00
Country
United States
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Libertarian
1. If you don't know the arguments of false teachers, you can't warn others against them as effectively.
2. If you don't understand what deluded people believe, you can't bring them back to the truth as easily.
3. If you don't know what a group is teaching, you can easily mischaracterize their teachings and classify teachings as false even when they're not. It's important to know which teachings are dangerous and which are not, even within the same group.
Open Theists have stripped God of what makes Him God.

EDF (exhaustive definitive foreknowledge) is a centerpiece of OT. They stultify God's omni-attributes, particularly God's omniscience. They contend God cannot know what has not yet happened. The futures has not been written, it is unknown, and cannot be known. Man's "say-so" according to Boyd is critical to God's will. God does not yet know what men will do, therefore the future is OPEN.

The massive problem with this is obvious. First, are we to believe God relinquishes sovereign control of His perfect will and governance to get input from man? A cursory reading of Isaiah illustrates the way God in which God navigates. God announces the future, God declares the beginning from the end, God tells us what will happen before it happens and glorifies His Majesty by doing so!!!

God is in absolute control. Man keeps trying to grab the wheel from the passenger side.
 
Upvote 0