Posted on 07/30/2007 10:18:00 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
A couple of trouble-making readers (relative, I believe, to the story of how I got saved) have lately been asking my opinion on the question of free will vs. predestination. For some time now I have struggled mightily to ignore their queries; when finally forced by etiquette to acknowledge them, I thoughtfully suggested they upgrade their cable service, or invest in pets. "You can watch Chinese soccer matches!" I tried. "And a dachshund can be so much fun! They look like sausages--with free will!"
But, alas, they weren't distracted.
For some reason, I've never been too interested in trying to suss out the exact relationship between my free will and the idea of God's already knowing my whole life. I once tried to do some reading on the matter, but immediately bumped into words like "determinism," "Calvinism," and "Arminianism."
And that's how I came to purchase our little dachshund, Emanuel Swedenborg.
And now the question has come up again.
Stupid eternal questions of critical theology. Why can't they just ... resolve themselves, already? Do we have to do everything ourselves?
So let me finally solve the whole question of free will vs. predestination, so that I can go back to watching Chinese soccer.
Now then. I am sure I have free will. To prove it, I will now do an imitation of Daffy Duck.
There. I did it. There's no way God could have predicted I would do that.
Ha! I just did an imitation of Daffy Duck imitating The Road Runner!
And--ow. I think I hurt my throat.
But the point is: I decided to do that larynx-traumatizer all by myself. There's no way that in any Book of Life written before time began there's an entry that says: "5:43 a.m. July 25, 2007. San Diego, California. Dork on couch does imitation of Daffy Duck imitating Road Runner."
Forget it. This proves I have free will.
Except I don't want to have free will. Which is to say, I don't want to be able to surprise God. A God so stuck in temporal time that he has to wait to see what will happen next doesn't sound like a very inspiring, very All-Knowing sort of deity. That sounds like ... me watching TV.
So forget that. God knows all. Period. That's not debatable.
So God did know I was going to wrench my poor little throat box!
And yet, he didn't stop me. How ... kind of him.
Okay, so what do we have here?
I think I have free will--but in actually I don't, because God, knowing all, is perfectly aware ahead of time of everything that I'll ever do, say, or think. Moreover, he causes me to do, say, and think everything I do.
Say, you know what I think?
I think I'll take little Emanuel Swedenborg for a walk.
Wait. That would be wrong. That would be me not getting the job done!
Totally unacceptable.
Hmmm.
Okay, here's what I think: When we're outside of God's grace--when we've chosen to be Fallen Independent Types--we have free will, because we've then placed ourselves outside of God's purview. But when we're with God--when we've surrendered ourselves to the reality of God's presence within us--then we don't have free will, because then our will is subsumed by the larger will of God.
Phffft. How is it that Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and all those other brainy theologians never thought of that?
Losers.
You know, sometimes I think Preeminent Theologian Types really just keep pretending all of this stuff is so hard, so that they don't have to go out and get real jobs. Clearly, anyone with half a ...
Whoa. Whoa!
Did God know that little Emanuel was going to go wee-wee on the leg of my favorite easy chair??
Consider passages such as ‘for thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night’ (Ps 90:4).
Why can’t He both be within time and outside of it?
I’ve often thought of God’s pleasure/displeasure as well.
When I think of God’s anger and displeasure, I think of the nature of God as our Father, and of His perfect love for us. He is always displeased with the sin we commit, just as I would be displeased with sins my own children commit.
Yet, do I ever stop loving my children or caring deeply about them because they sin? I’d say that my displeasure comes because I love them and want the best for them.
If my children are truly seeking to follow in the right path, then do I let their stumbles along the way distract from that? When Paul talks of love in that wonderful passage from 1 Corinthians, I’m always struck by the line, “Love keeps no record of wrongs”.
What a wonderful thought and example of what our love should be.
Amen Biker.
He not only knows the end of the movie, He was the Director, Producer, Editor, and Caterer!
This is a key statement you make.
It speaks to the desire of intimacy that God seeks to have with us. Now think about that comment! God "SEEKS" to have with us. That indicates that at one point He doesn't have it, and then at another point He may have. God waits!!! In order to wait, time must pass.
My non-complete thought on this issue is this: Although God exists in eternity past, eternity present, and eternity future, He, at the same time, can experience intimacy with me inside the time frame He has created that I walk in.
Now, how much of the knowledge God has, since knowing of all eternity from being there, and how it may affect the present intimate experience He has with me, this I don't know, because as you point out Paul's words, I'm looking through a glass...
I thought this “Slice” might be apropos to this discussion:
http://www.rzim.org/slice/slicetran.php?sliceid=1472
Spirit LIFE is more alive and less restricted, yet we have so little tangible evidence of this level of reality, by our standards derived from our manipulations of spacetime. We have the biblical stories of One who came to this limits well and lived and died and rose again from the dead, to occupy a physical body capable of 'beyondness' to these limits, appearing inside a locked room thus it would appear by some means passing through solid walls then becoming solid again. In the Old Testament we have the scene of a hand appearing to write upon a wall, while the remainder of the being to which the hand was attached remained in a state of reality outside the sensing of the people in the room.
It is a seeming paradox that God is greater than the creation yet can inhabit the creation and move freely in and out of the limits well. And even more paradoxical, this Creator actually tells us He desires to commune with us ... created beings!
When we think of power, we conceive of the authority to order others about, or we think of the ability to plug into sources to do work our limited power of animal self cannot achieve or achieve as quickly. But their is a power which seems to whisp about as if mere breeze, a thing as tenuous as a thought. Yet this power is greater than all the forces of the limits well we inhabit.
The writer is wrong.
riter is rong?
What if PREdestination(knowing the end of a journey) meant that "He (Christ) came to SAVE(destination-heaven) His people(God gave Him before the foundation of the world) from their sins(the fallen state of man)? and His people, while here on earth, have the free-will(their choice) to choose whether or not to serve(keep his commandments) Him.
Once you entered in you’d find the sign: “Welcome Chosen Ones!”.
I love that one!
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