Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, June 21, 2004

Free Will or Predestination

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. I have two former students, one on each side of the debate, with whom I have been conversing on this idea for the last couple of weeks and I've come to a couple of conclusions. First, the extremes are right out. If God gives you the gifts of the Holy Spirit at baptism and you don't get a say in which ones you end up with then there is some level at which God controls the game. On the other side, how can you work out your salvation if you don't have a say in the game. Too often those on the extreme Free Will side of the game say that we get to decide it all...we don't. Those who are extreme Calvinist say we get to decide nothing...which is full of its own set of philosophical problems.

One student is advocating the "Open View" which is a lovely name for us postmodern types who like the idea of openness. They disagree with those scholars who call for God to exist outside of time and a number of other things. They claim that that Bible is their only authority and thus the scholar's additional info must be wrong. But if that's true and those self-same scholars actually decided what's in the Bible they claim to gather their supporting info from doesn't that lead one to question the validity of something? Secondly, if God is bound inside the time constraints of His own creation and thus can't see for certain what may take place in the future then how does prophecy work? I sense several serious theological and philosophical problems with this view. I need to study it more but at this point I'm far from convinced.

Others claim that for God to know all He had to establish all. I won't go into all the problems here but this view comes from a rather limited view of God's relationship with His creation. They, too, claim the Bible as their source but also run into the contradiction that they disagree with those who put the Bible together. The bishops in the early church were pretty clear that man had free will and that he was made in the image of God which means that he can't be totally depraved.

Looking at Christ we see that He came for one purpose, to redeem man to God. Things were pretty well established in terms of His life. But He did have the choice as to whether He got to take that path or not...God always has free will. I think the same is true for us. There are things we have little or no control over and then there are things we have choice in.

Beyond this...I'm still working.

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Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Gone so long...

What to write...hmm. There's been so much and so little. Let's see, how about a quick race update:

I did well at Helen though a little mechanical mishap cost me a couple of places. I finished 11th on two broken spokes caused by another rider crashing into me. I had a good shot at the podium until that happened but that's racing. Sometimes things go your way and sometimes not so much.

Following Helen I took a couple of weeks to do some time trial training and then went down and raced at the South Carolina State TT Championships. Somewhat surprisingly I won the Masters 35-39 age group and had the third best time. Big shock for me. Since I'm not an SC resident I don't get a medal or a jersey but the win does mean I get to go to the US Master's National Championship in Salt Lake this August. I'm pretty jazzed about that.

The big news is that of Ronald Reagan's passage. I grew up with Preseident Reagan and he was the first President I ever voted for. I served on the color gaurd for his vist to Medford when I was 17 which was a huge honor. I remember all the back and forth between he and the liberals led by Tip O'Neil. The media really didn't like Reagan much as I guess they thought he'd be a lot like Nixon. They were really wrong about that. He didn't have "hit lists" and while he might disagree with you he was never mean of ill-spirited towards someone. He was a leader with vision and purpose that served him well, though at times it seemed to blind him to doing the right thing. I didn't agree with Reagan on everything and there were times when I really questioned whether he was the right guy to lead our nation but looking back I wish we had him that any of the past couple of President who don't seem to be able to get beyond partisanship.

I think that's the thing that has me down about politics now. Everyone is so divided. Bush is the anti-Christ or he's the new Messiah. Clinton was JFK all over again or he was...well...JFK all over again if you get my point. Both men are just that, men. They do things right and they do things wrong. I'm so glad I don't have a media looking at everything I do with the hope of selling more newspapers. Every curricular decision would be analyzed. Every disaffected student's comment would end up a headline in some papers and every student who felt like they had learned some deep insight would be featured in some different papers. I would be a characiture of myself int he eyes of all those who never saw me but did. I think this whole thing, at least in modern times, started with the conservatives out to get Clinton who certainly did little to offer a better personal side to himself. The liberal media tried to do the same thing to Reagan but for some reason it never stuck. Maybe Sam Donaldson was too nice a guy. Maybe Reagan was too well liked by too many people. Whatever the reason, he did what his successors have since been unable to do and that is to rise above the ugliness of partisanship and muckraking. I can't honestly see either Bush or Kerry ever doing that.

Sigh.

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