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Post by Josh on Nov 26, 2010 9:38:53 GMT -8
I agree that this was almost a non-issue for people in bible times (excepting perhaps Romans 9). I also agree with him that people in Bible times took free will for granted. I'm not sure where I'm currently at on my overall view.
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Post by robin on Nov 29, 2010 9:33:02 GMT -8
Be careful Josh, If you keep reading Gregory Boyd you will soon become very sympathetic the the open theist view. Do I sense a slight movement in that direction?
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Post by rbbailey on Sept 7, 2011 20:41:05 GMT -8
Gregory Boyd has an interesting argument on this topic. He notes the almost total absence of any philosophical quandry about free will/ predistination in the bible, concluding that this was not something that kept people in biblical times "up at nights". This, he reasons, indicates that they must have assumed one side as the dominant explanation (free will or predestination) and that when you look at it, they had no developed view of predestination and seem overall from the evidence to have assumed free will. The reason they don't specifically teach free will, but rather seem to assume it, is that they didn't share the philosophical quandry we have inherited from the Hellenistic church fathers. I agree with this line of reasoning. It think that really depends on who you were in those times. If you were a practicing Jew you most likely had a very different viewpoint on predestination than your average Roman polytheist. I still can't quite get over my feeling that predestination for some does not automatically mean we are all predestined. For example... maybe a role is predestined -- if Paul had not converted, someone else would have taken his place in that predestined hole in human history. At the same time, it is almost impossible to imagine that Paul's conversion was not predestined. But again, at the same time, what did Christ come for then? He chose to die, so that we might gain a choice. It used to be that we had to choose to dedicate our lives to the pursuit of perfection to get to the right place in the afterlife. After Christ's choice (and are we not called to be like Christ?) to allow for his sacrifice to be made, we were given the choice to accept predestination over damnation. It works itself into a perfect paradox. We get a choice to be predestined. Odd, but I kind of think it works.
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