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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