Predetermination of the elect?

[Matt33]

While thinking about something a Calvanists was talking about I came upon this question? If God knows all, from begining to end then He knows already who is in heaven. So how does free will come into play?

 

[Bob_Crowley]

While thinking about something a Calvanists was talking about I came upon this question? If God knows all, from begining to end then He knows already who is in heaven. So how does free will come into play?

It depends on which end you’re looking from. Taking the purely Calvinistic viewpoint, then God does know all. But we don’t. From our point of view, we have “free will”, and can make choices.

Personally I think God holds Himself back in some way.

This question has some personal import for me. I was originally baptised Presbyterian by my “Catholic” father (a stupid form of rebellion on his part), but because my first and most influential pastor (after I became Christian) was a Methodist by training, I missed out on the hardline Calvinism of at least one of the hierarchy (who thinks he can lie his head off, sabotage the careers of several of his fellow pastors, and mine, and still remain one of the “elect”), for which I am thankful.

As you’re probably aware, the Presbyterians are Calvinistic or “Reformed”.

I’ll tell three stories here - the first is my oft repeated observation that on the night my father died, he appeared in my room. He started with an apology, we exchanged comments of one sort or another, and then he disappeared, but not before giving this terrifying scream. Personally I think basically witnessed his judgment.

But during the exchange he at one stage cried out, “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!”

I objected, even though at that time I was an atheist. He replied, “Oh, it’s right, all right. You can see that from here!” Yet later in the same exchange he admitted, “I was willing!” (To be cruel and vindictive pretty much the whole time he was my father. Very cruel actually.). So that’s one story, where he stated he “always was doomed” but also admitted he was “willing”. He still had free will, and it was ***his deliberate choice ***to be vindictively cruel for so long.

My second story concerns a prediction my father made the night he appeared. At one stage he said, “You’ll meet a pastor. You’ll think he’s great, but all he’ll do is to discourage you even more!”

I met the old pastor mentioned above almost four years after my father died. About 8 years after that the pastor apologised with the following words, “I owe you an apology. You needed encouragement, but all I’ve done is to discourage you even more.”

I think you can see the connection between my “dead” father’s connection and the apology by the pastor. So clearly my father could somehow see some elements of the future from his position at the judgment seat. His prediction occurred, even though I did not set out to meet this particular pastor. But it happened.

That was the second story.other story concerns the old pastor. He himself was prophetic, and I found over time that if he thought something would happen or was true or false, it nearly always did or was.

He once said to me that at some stage he thought I’d be doing a cleaning job, that I wouldn’t be doing it for long, and that the Lord would just want me to hear about a “ghost”. Now ever though I knew by then how accurate his predictions were, I still thought that one was a bit over the top.

Now he died in January 1992. Yet in 2006, I did a cleaning job for a short time, didn’t like it much, but heard about a ‘ghost’ in one of the premises I was cleaning. It was a former suicide dating back to the 1960’s as far as I could work out. My role was to get a mass said for the suicide. Yet way back in probably 1991, my old pastor could make that weird prediction which happened about 15 years later. The only way he could have made that prediction was if the Lord was telling him.

So God could obviously see that far into the future on one particular aspect of my life.

The trouble with the “elect” doctrine is that it leads to spiritual arrogance. I happen to go to a particular Catholic psychiatrist, and he told me that a certain Presbyterian personage had been involved in the stress related breakdowns of about eight Presbyterian pastors, who had come to him for psychiatric counselling. The cause was another pastor, whom, as I said, thinks he can lie, deceive, conspire and still be one of the ‘elect’. He’s got another think coming. I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes at his own judgment.

I also think that to a certain extent God holds Himself back. In fact, for free will to exist at all, He has to do so. That also explains why He appears so weak in this world - He delegates as much as possible, and so evil gets quite a bit of leeway in human affairs.

We have free will. Adolf Hitler was willing to be a tyrant, and demand that everyone else serve him. Mother Teresa was willing to be a saint, and denied herself to serve everyone else. I have no doubt whatsoever Hitler is in Hell, and Mother Teresa is in Heaven. They may have been predestined in some form, but at the same time they were predestined by their own ***willing ***complicity.

As was my father.

 

[Miss_Shelby]

While thinking about something a Calvanists was talking about I came upon this question? If God knows all, from begining to end then He knows already who is in heaven. So how does free will come into play?

God knows, but we don’t. The only reasonable assurance we have that we are (and will stay) elected is by remaining in the vine. And remaining in the vine is a choice.

 

[TomD123]

God knows what we are going to do next but that does not mean he makes us do it. God asks us to be good and he knows what our response will be without forcing us to do anything

 

[USMCatholic]

This is one of those things that some people, such as myself, have absolutely no problem accepting, and to others, it seems an insurmountable philosophical hurdle to the concept of an all-knowing God. Here’s how I explain it:
Saying that God knows the future does not truly explain the truth. It is a very limited explanation, forced onto us by our perception of time as a line, with B following A and preceding C. A happens, then B, then C. However, God does not exist within time. He is outside of it. Time doesn’t have any meaning to Him. To God, there is no past or future; only the present. All times are present to Him. He doesn’t foresee you reading the next sentence or me writing it, He is currently watching it. He doesn’t remember the last thing you ate, he is currently watching you eat it. We are forced to explain it, through the limitation of our language and perception, as God knowing the future and remembering the past. But these terms are meaningless when applied to God.
For a much better treatment of the question of how free will fits with an all-knowing God, I cannot suggest enough that you read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. He has a chapter in it that deals with just this specific issue. Book 4, Ch 3. “Time and Beyond Time.” I hope you read it.

 

[lemondiesel]

+1 for the guy above me, that was a good read…

God doesn’t control every little event that takes place, he can and does engineer circumstances in this world. The evils we face to today are natural evil, the sins that are not our moral sin. Evil is the result of free will. If God really wanted to give humans free will he would have had to create evil, presenting both good and evil. He’d still know what they were going to pick but at least humans get live and make there own choices.