God's sovereignty and the responsibility of mankind. A reformed question.

[GodsGrace101]

Good point. Please be open-minded to annihilationism, for example. Hell is unlikely to be an infinitely long sentence for a finite crime.

You describe the horrors of double-predestination:

Since Arminians tend to resist full monergism/election, their solution seems inadequate to me. On the other hand they are correct that Paul believed anyone can be saved (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). Let's go back to Adam and resolve this properly. True justice allows me to suffer consequences for Adam's sins only if I myself am Adam - or at least a tiny piece of his physical soul. Back then we functioned as one dense physical mind named Adam even though you and I don't remember it, we don't remember freely choosing to consume the forbidden fruit. Millard J. Erickson has rightly stated, "We were all [physically] present in Adam, and all sinned in his act" (Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001, reprint), p. 654).

Romans 9:22: "What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?"

God cannot feel wrath/anger at the innocent! Nor at deterministic puppets! The point of that passage is that God has every right to elect whomsoever He wills because we lost our rights when we sinned in Adam. You'll reply that Jacob and Esau were elected before they did anything bad of good. Not true. Admittedly as Jacob and Esau - in that prenatal state - they had as yet done nothing wrong. But Romans 1 thru 8 came first. According to those earlier chapters, all sinned, at least in Adam.

Can anyone be saved? In my view, God preelected sections/pieces of Adam's physical soul unto salvation before the foundation of the world, in case he should fall. My theory is that every human being's soul consists of at least one elect piece. That means anyone can be saved. If a person dies unsaved, his soul goes to hell, but God extracts his elect piece, moving it on to another generation. Eventually all the elect pieces will be saved by divine monergism.

To summarize: all people are the elect, and as such, anyone MIGHT be saved.

"Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may [MIGHT] obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory." (2 Tim 2:10).

Intercession should be made for everyone because prayer can move God to monergistically save anyone.

Hi Jal
I'm here because of a link you posted on a different thread.

The above is very much thought through but is full of problems.

How do you come up with these ideas?
Don't you think we're in dangerous territory when we stray from the bible and the writings of the early church theologians?

 

[GodsGrace101]

Incidentally, the phrase "sinful nature" doesn't exist in the Greek NT. As I recall, that's a (poor) English translation of Paul's term "flesh".

Just fell on this...
Everyone has a different name for what it is that makes us tend toward sin before salvation.
Flesh, sin nature, concupiscense, whatever we call it, it means the same.
Unfortunately we don't all use the same dictionary!

 

[Mark Quayle]

Good point. Please be open-minded to annihilationism, for example. Hell is unlikely to be an infinitely long sentence for a finite crime.

You describe the horrors of double-predestination:

Since Arminians tend to resist full monergism/election, their solution seems inadequate to me. On the other hand they are correct that Paul believed anyone can be saved (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). Let's go back to Adam and resolve this properly. True justice allows me to suffer consequences for Adam's sins only if I myself am Adam - or at least a tiny piece of his physical soul. Back then we functioned as one dense physical mind named Adam even though you and I don't remember it, we don't remember freely choosing to consume the forbidden fruit. Millard J. Erickson has rightly stated, "We were all [physically] present in Adam, and all sinned in his act" (Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001, reprint), p. 654).

Romans 9:22: "What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?"

God cannot feel wrath/anger at the innocent! Nor at deterministic puppets! The point of that passage is that God has every right to elect whomsoever He wills because we lost our rights when we sinned in Adam. You'll reply that Jacob and Esau were elected before they did anything bad of good. Not true. Admittedly as Jacob and Esau - in that prenatal state - they had as yet done nothing wrong. But Romans 1 thru 8 came first. According to those earlier chapters, all sinned, at least in Adam.

Can anyone be saved? In my view, God preelected sections/pieces of Adam's physical soul unto salvation before the foundation of the world, in case he should fall. My theory is that every human being's soul consists of at least one elect piece. That means anyone can be saved. If a person dies unsaved, his soul goes to hell, but God extracts his elect piece, moving it on to another generation. Eventually all the elect pieces will be saved by divine monergism.

To summarize: all people are the elect, and as such, anyone MIGHT be saved.

"Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may [MIGHT] obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory." (2 Tim 2:10).

Intercession should be made for everyone because prayer can move God to monergistically save anyone.

So it's up to mere chance, after all, who will be saved? BTW, "may" in the Greek there does not imply "who knows?". It is causative, in the sense of "in order that they too will obtain salvation."

 

[JAL]

So it's up to mere chance, after all, who will be saved?

Intercessory prayer isn't random chance. On this point, the written testimonies of Charles Finney (America's greatest revival preacher) and Yonggi Cho (who built the largest congregation in church history) seem fairly credible to me. Both men attested to persevering in prayer for the salvation of individual after individual until the Inward Witness affirmed, "Yes he will be saved."

 

[JAL]

Hi Jal
I'm here because of a link you posted on a different thread.

The above is very much thought through but is full of problems.

I'm not aware of any unresolved problems.

How do you come up with these ideas?
Don't you think we're in dangerous territory when we stray from the bible and the writings of the early church theologians?

I don't see where I've strayed from the Bible. While I respect the church fathers, they are not infallible.

 

[JAL]

Just fell on this...
Everyone has a different name for what it is that makes us tend toward sin before salvation.
Flesh, sin nature, concupiscense, whatever we call it, it means the same.
Unfortunately we don't all use the same dictionary!

The translation "sinful nature" is misleading for two reasons:
...(1) It can be understood to support the (incoherent) two-natured theory.
...(2) It supports immaterialism by veiling Paul's understanding of the sinful mind as a physical substance called body/flesh (especially in Romans 7 and 8).

Yes the "body" can be considered sinful insofar as it is a composition of protoplasm and a (physical) soul.

 

[Mark Quayle]

Intercessory prayer isn't random chance. On this point, the written testimonies of Charles Finney (America's greatest revival preacher) and Yonggi Cho (who built the largest congregation in church history) seem fairly credible to me. Both men attested to persevering in prayer for the salvation of individual after individual until the Inward Witness affirmed, "Yes he will be saved."

You're completely missing the point. The Law of Causation says what is obvious, or at least instinctive, to everyone including children, even many animals, that every effect has a cause. In your example here, prayer, those who pray were caused to pray. What caused them to pray? I don't know, but we can be sure that something did. And we can be sure that that something was caused by something else, (unless it was God himself that caused it. This chain of causation always goes logically back to God. All things, except for God himself, are effects —caused effects. Only God himself is entirely spontaneous.

If you reject that God caused it, then you are saying that chance caused it, or you are just as outrageously saying that people's free will acts as freely (according to causation) as God's. I don't think you really want to say that we operate on his level as far as will and choice.

 

[Clare73]

The translation "sinful nature" is misleading for two reasons:
...(1) It can be understood to support the (incoherent) two-natured theory.
...(2) It supports immaterialism by veiling Paul's understanding of the sinful mind as a physical substance called body/flesh (especially in Romans 7 and 8).

Yes the "body" can be considered sinful insofar as it is a composition of protoplasm and a (physical) soul.

The NT presents two natures in man (Ro 7:21-25), spiritual and carnal (fleshly), sin nature in the body, and spiritual nature, where the mind is the link between the body and the spirit natures.

 

[JAL]

You're completely missing the point. The Law of Causation says what is obvious, or at least instinctive, to everyone including children, even many animals, that every effect has a cause. In your example here, prayer, those who pray were caused to pray. What caused them to pray? I don't know, but we can be sure that something did. And we can be sure that that something was caused by something else, (unless it was God himself that caused it. This chain of causation always goes logically back to God. All things, except for God himself, are effects —caused effects. Only God himself is entirely spontaneous.

If you reject that God caused it, then you are saying that chance caused it, or you are just as outrageously saying that people's free will acts as freely (according to causation) as God's. I don't think you really want to say that we operate on his level as far as will and choice.

Oh the power of indoctrination! The church fathers assumed that God MUST be a being attaining to, or even transcending, every philosophical ideal humanly conceivable. In their view He is, by necessity, the philosophically ideal Being - and then they sought to make a list of those ideals. This kind of God, of course, is NOTHING LIKE man. According to William Lane Craig, the Reformed theologians adhered to the same manner of reasoning about God. He's not saying they are wrong in all their conclusions - he accepts several of them. But he frankly admits that NONE of them can be proven from Scripture. It's pure philosophy. Moving beyond Craig, other sources tell us that much of this ideology originated in Plato.

The upshot is a Christology beset with incoherence and contradictions such as:
...(1) An immutable God became man? Huh?
...(2) An immutably holy God has free will - freedom to choose evil? Huh?
...(3) God is infinite - which has NO MEANING because infinity is not even a specific/discrete number. Huh?

In my opinion, God couldn't care less about Plato's incredibly stupid philosophy. He has no correlation to all that abstract nonsense. The church fathers never seriously entertained the possibility that God is literally one of us - which is MY position. He was the first person to achieve fullness of sentience. I so define Him in post 15 of this other thread.

You are a fallible theologian. As such, you need to consider ALL POSSIBILITIES as to whom Yahweh might be. MY theory is that He is merely our father - not some bizarre philosophical ideal filled with contradictions at every turn.

Or you are just as outrageously saying that people's free will acts as freely (according to causation) as God's. I don't think you really want to say that we operate on his level as far as will and choice.

That is EXACTLY what I want to say. You'll of course ask, "If God is one of us, why does He merit the highest praise?" Because there is only one possible definition of merit:

Merit is a status achieved by freely choosing to labor/suffer for a righteous cause over an extended period of time.

As an Old Earth Creationist, it is my belief that Yahweh labored to become perfect in holiness for a minimum of 13 billion years - that's just the lower bound based on scientific dating. In reality, it could have been 100 times that long - we simply don't know.

 

[Clare73]

Oh the power of indoctrination! The church fathers assumed that God MUST be a being attaining to, or even transcending, every philosophical ideal humanly conceivable. In their view He is, by necessity, the philosophically ideal Being - and then they sought to make a list of those ideals. This kind of God, of course, is NOTHING LIKE man. According to William Lane Craig, the Reformed theologians adhered to the same manner of reasoning about God. He's not saying they are wrong in all their conclusions - he accepts several of them. But he frankly admits that NONE of them can be proven from Scripture. It's pure philosophy. Moving beyond Craig, other sources tell us that much of this ideology originated in Plato.

The upshot is a Christology beset with incoherence and contradictions such as:
...(1) An immutable God became man? Huh?

Back at you. . .See John 1:1, 14.

The immutable God did not change the essence, nature or being of himself, which is the meaning of immutable.

...(2) An immutably holy God has free will - freedom to choose evil? Huh?

Ability and execution are two different things.

Best I can tell, the problem is in your understanding of the material, not in the material itself.
Scripture speaks to that issue, by the way.

I have the ability to be cruel to my pet Corgi, but that ain't ever a choice I'm gonna' freely make.
I choose to be immutable in that regard.

...(3) God is infinite - which has NO MEANING because infinity is not even a specific/discrete number. Huh?

Precisely!. . .nor can a specific/discrete number be assigned to God.

In my opinion, God couldn't care less about Plato's incredibly stupid philosophy. He has no correlation to all that abstract nonsense. The church fathers never seriously entertained the possibility that God is literally one of us - which is MY position. He was the first person to achieve fullness of sentience. I so define Him in post 15 of this other thread.
You are a fallible theologian. As such, you need to consider ALL POSSIBILITIES as to whom Yahweh might be. MY theory is that He is merely our father - not some bizarre philosophical ideal filled with contradictions at every turn.
That is EXACTLY what I want to say. You'll of course ask, "If God is one of us, why does He merit the highest praise?" Because there is only one possible definition of merit:

Merit is a status achieved by freely choosing to labor/suffer for a righteous cause over an extended period of time.

As an Old Earth Creationist, it is my belief that Yahweh labored to become perfect in holiness for a minimum of 13 billion years - that's just the lower bound based on scientific dating. In reality, it could have been 100 times that long - we simply don't know.

The word of God presents God as immutable (Mal 3:6; Ja 1:17), not changing by progression in holiness.
And the immutable God presents himself as holy (Lev 10:3, 11:44-45, 19:2, 20:26, 21:28).

Where do you get this contra-Biblical nonsense?

 

[JAL]

Back at you. . .See John 1:1, 14.

Back at you...See John 1:1, 14.

 

[JAL]

@Clare73,

Citing a verse doesn't resolve the contradiction. The verse teaches that God became a man.

It does not support your contradiction that an immutable God became man.

 

[JAL]

The NT presents two natures in man (Ro 7:21-25), spiritual and carnal (fleshly), sin nature in the body, and spiritual nature, where the mind is the link between the body and the spirit natures.

No it does not present two natures beccause such language is unclear/incoherent, as explained at post 74 and posts 76,77, 78.

 

[Clare73]

Back at you...See John 1:1, 14.

Jn 1:1, 14 is the word of God from the authoritative-to-the-church God-breathed Scriptures (2 Tim 3:16).

 

[Clare73]

Citing a verse doesn't resolve the contradiction. The verse teaches that God became a man.

It does not support your contradiction that an immutable God became man.

The immutable God did not change the essence, nature or being of himself, which is the meaning of immutable.

 

[Clare73]

No it does not present two natures beccause such language is unclear/incoherent, as explained at post 74 and posts 76,77, 78.

May be unclear/incoherent to you, but not to those who know the Scriptures.

 

[JAL]

The immutable God did not change the essence, nature or being of himself, which is the meaning of immutable.

Among the supposedly immutable traits of God are:
...infinite knowledge
...indefatiguability
...immutable holiness (no such thing as real temptation in the wildnerness)
...impassibility

Is that a fair description of the Incarnate Christ? I think not.

 

[JAL]

May be unclear/incoherent to you, but not to those who know the Scriptures.

If an object can have two conflicting natures - the second one contradicting, excluding, ruling out the other - then there is no such thing in reality known as the truth of the matter. There is no truth. For example God could be evil in nature, and holy in nature, at the same time. All contradictions are valid.

If this is what you believe, there is no point in my carrying on a discussion with you. Thanks for your time.

 

[Clare73]

Among the supposedly immutable traits of God are:
...infinite knowledge
...indefatiguability
...immutable holiness (no such thing as real temptation in the wildnerness)
...impassibility

Is that a fair description of the Incarnate Christ? I think not.

And on this you think, rightly.

Show where either Christian theology (which evidently you do not understand) or Scripture states that the man Christ had access to all the attributes of God.
You might start with Php 2:6-8.
You might continue with a consideration of our limited understanding of the Trinity as revealed in the NT.

 

[JAL]

And on this you think, rightly.

Show where either Christian theology (which evidently you do not understand) or Scripture states that the man Christ had access to all the attributes of God.
You might start with Php 2:6-8.
You might continue with a consideration of our limited understanding of the Trinity as revealed in the NT.

Exactly. The Incarnate Christ did NOT have those omni-attributes. God CHANGED into a man, which means He was NEVER immutable.