The most common view in the religious world today is that God actively chooses who he wants to save and who he does not want to save and they say it is absolutely impossible to have faith, to believe, unless God steps in and gives it to you.
Maybe in the western protestant religions, but that is not the "common view in the religious world".
Hmmm. Maybe.. God wanted to be everything.. and struggles at trying to save every stinking fragment of Himself since eternity, or the big divide began..
Augustine and Calvin, and Darby who was a proponent of Calv(ism) more or less, mostly more I guess.
Pre destination is a theo logical conclusion, an expository of God's sovereignty. It's not really scriptural unless you take a kind of flat earth approach to what the Bible declares God to be, and how God speaks of Himself. It resists the idea that God could have a "divine plan" or intent that would span all time and allow for a creation that has "free will" or what I prefer to term "free choice".
I don't believe God's sovereignty is threatened or diminished by His creation, mankind in our case, having the capacity to choose between one or more options.
Genesis certainly speaks to that, if I take it on face value not in a literal sense but as a conceptualization of how man and God interact. Man has choices. That's by design, clearly.
Since pre destination is all forward thinking - it assumes a future that is decided by God - one only has to view the fact that the future always has a past to realize that God can't have decided something like how a person will choose.
Calvin held forth that a person was destined by God to believe or not to believe, to be saved or not, to go to "hell" or to go to "heaven". Nothing that man does has anything to do with that outcome.
It sounds possible and in line with how God describes Himself in Old Testament writings but - BIG but - the future is always "pre destined" when it finally happens. When it occurs it could be assumed that any action taken to change it in the past would still produce the events that actually happened - a loop, in effect that will always fulfill itself.
That reality may or may not be "controlled" by God but it doesn't mean that God actually causes any one thing to happen, like someone believing in Jesus Christ as the son of God. Once a person does it can't be changed that they did because they - did. To do so would create alternate timelines, supposedly, and if that occurs we don't know it and never will because we're in "this" one. So it doesn't matter, practically speaking. The fact that we choose and make choices, by all measurable understanding, is enough to indicate that God - WANTS - us to make the correct choice and not the wrong one. SO - God's sovereignty is actually magnified, in my opinion, by man's "free will".
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cman
Maybe in the western protestant religions, but that is not the "common view in the religious world".
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Ham
Hmmm. Maybe.. God wanted to be everything.. and struggles at trying to save every stinking fragment of Himself since eternity, or the big divide began..
Just a thought.
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waysider
It just sounds like a bunch of Darby dogma, restated. No offense intended.
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socks
Augustine and Calvin, and Darby who was a proponent of Calv(ism) more or less, mostly more I guess.
Pre destination is a theo logical conclusion, an expository of God's sovereignty. It's not really scriptural unless you take a kind of flat earth approach to what the Bible declares God to be, and how God speaks of Himself. It resists the idea that God could have a "divine plan" or intent that would span all time and allow for a creation that has "free will" or what I prefer to term "free choice".
I don't believe God's sovereignty is threatened or diminished by His creation, mankind in our case, having the capacity to choose between one or more options.
Genesis certainly speaks to that, if I take it on face value not in a literal sense but as a conceptualization of how man and God interact. Man has choices. That's by design, clearly.
Since pre destination is all forward thinking - it assumes a future that is decided by God - one only has to view the fact that the future always has a past to realize that God can't have decided something like how a person will choose.
Calvin held forth that a person was destined by God to believe or not to believe, to be saved or not, to go to "hell" or to go to "heaven". Nothing that man does has anything to do with that outcome.
It sounds possible and in line with how God describes Himself in Old Testament writings but - BIG but - the future is always "pre destined" when it finally happens. When it occurs it could be assumed that any action taken to change it in the past would still produce the events that actually happened - a loop, in effect that will always fulfill itself.
That reality may or may not be "controlled" by God but it doesn't mean that God actually causes any one thing to happen, like someone believing in Jesus Christ as the son of God. Once a person does it can't be changed that they did because they - did. To do so would create alternate timelines, supposedly, and if that occurs we don't know it and never will because we're in "this" one. So it doesn't matter, practically speaking. The fact that we choose and make choices, by all measurable understanding, is enough to indicate that God - WANTS - us to make the correct choice and not the wrong one. SO - God's sovereignty is actually magnified, in my opinion, by man's "free will".
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Ham
Ever think.. at birth, one is predestined to be conformed to the image of his son..
then *we* have to sort through all kinds of strange, unbecoming, and evil s*it.
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