About ten years ago, someone asked me about Jean Calvin. They were trying to wrap their heads around the fact that he believed in "double predestination" and simultaneously thought "God is love" (1 John 4:8).
Please let Calvin himself explain:
"I again ask how it is that the fall of Adam involves so many nations with their infant children in eternal death without remedy unless that it so seemed meet to God? Here the most loquacious tongues must be dumb. The decree, I admit, is, dreadful; and yet it is impossible to deny that God foreknow what the end of man was to be before he made him, and foreknew, because he had so ordained by his decree. Should any one here inveigh against the prescience of God, he does it rashly and unadvisedly. For why, pray, should it be made a charge against the heavenly Judge, that he was not ignorant of what was to happen?"
"Nor ought it to seem absurd when I say, that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it. For as it belongs to his wisdom to foreknow all future events, so it belongs to his power to rule and govern them by his hand."
See Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.23.7
Sporadic theological and historical musings by Edgar Foster (Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies and one of Jehovah's Witnesses).
Calvin was at least consistent, even if his God was, literally, evil, a God whom no one can really love. Barth's "left hand of God" wasn't much better, although it was less direct.
ReplyDeleteOnce one takes an exhaustive foreknowledge view of God, in my view, the only coherent option is universalism, here I think David Bentley Hart is correct, if God created only one person to empty his wrath on, and that this was to the glory of God, then that person would really be our redeemer, who redeemed us from the sadism of God.
Here's an article by David Hart on this issue.
https://journal.radicalorthodoxy.org/index.php/ROTPP/article/view/135/86
John Ch.7:6ESV"Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is ALWAYS here."
ReplyDeleteJohn Ch.10:18NIV""No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”"
ReplyDeleteLife is the property of JEHOVAH, There is nothing sadistic about God setting just terms and conditions for the use of his property. A dead man cannot Father children. If Said man is dead because he chose to take up arms against his creator,then the loss to any potential children he may have had otherwise is owed to his arrogance/egoism not any "Sadism" on JEHOVAH'S part.
The Socinian conception of divine knowledge is completely untenable. No matter the form it is given, it undermines either the infallibility or the absolute self-sufficiency of God's conditional knowledge of the future. Bellarmine, Becanus (and perhaps Molina himself) believed that God sees the future and the potential decisions of free will (conditionate futurum, futuribile) at their root, thoroughly understanding the created will (in supercomprehensione voluntatis creatae). However, it is clear that will, considered in itself, contains only the possibilities and at most inclinations of future free actions, and thus can only provide approximate knowledge, sometimes morally certain, but not infallible. More recent Molinists generally say that since the conditional future free actions are objectively true (obiective et in se), God knows them in their objective truth. But this objective truth either originates from God or it does not. If it does, then we are back to the foundational thought of Thomism; if not, they stand opposed to God, forming a world independent of Him, like the great book of the future, the contents of which God only learns if He reads it. But this contradicts the self-sufficiency of divine knowledge; nothing and no one outside of God can direct or influence His knowledge. This consideration is not altered by the fact that the objective truth of the potential realities is reflected by the divine essence, being eternally present there. For this is exactly the question: why do they owe their eternal presence, why does God’s essence reflect them?
ReplyDeleteIn His decision to create, God could not be led by those who consciously align themselves against Him; He could not reward the wicked by not creating them out of mere undeserved mercy. He created humans and left it to them to decide whether they want to be saved or not. Whoever then chooses damnation, let them blame themselves and not God. If we ask why God wanted such an order of being, where some are saved and others are damned? The Thomists' answer: Because God found this order of being, for reasons inscrutable to us, suitable for proclaiming His glory through its variety, by exercising His grace and at the same time His stern justice.