If one is a universalist this is no issue at all. The Lutheran position also prevents worrying that one has done ‘enough’ to gain the favor of God.
Not talking about Adam and Eve here:
PS 139:13-15
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
I think it is quite the opposite, unlike the secular view, in Christianity I have always seen it expressed as God made us
I’m Methodist. We believe Grace is available to all, but that we have to decide if we’ll accept God’s grace. We don’t believe in pre-destination.
So, no Jesus then. (That’s intervention.) I’m cool with that.
Prophet to God: What happened? You told me that if the King attacked, he would win a wonderful victory. He followed my advice and got his ass kicked.
God: Oh, he won in worldline Alef. Your in wordline gimmel. Sucks to be you.
So, in your view the reason for god not answering prayers is not that he doesn’t, but he does in a different parallel universe. Makes religion even more useless than I thought.
Actually not at birth, but at t = - ∞. And whether or not god chose, or the person chose (when, since the choice is known billions of years before the person was born) their fate is still set.
One interesting question, which refers to the Hitler example, is why God can’t keep a person sentenced to eternal damnation from being born. Eternal damnation for some (most?) must maximize good in some way.
BTW, if the idea that your example is a strawman, how does it not follow for an omniscient god? If you had a child who took a gun and announced they were going to blow up their class, and you knew they were going to, and you didn’t do anything to stop them, which you could with no danger to yourself, aren’t you just the tiniest bit culpable yourself?
God needs Redshirts to die and be punished to keep the others in line.
Because the version I heard was that God effectively makes the decision independent of any choices the person make. The resolution to this form of predestination works if there is no free will.
Depends what you believe. It gets very muddled if you take things that one Christian said and attribute them to Christians who believe something completely different.
C.S. Lewis, who I mentioned before as arguing for ‘God the observer’, seems to think that people damn themselves, by choosing to turn away from God. They can choose to go back to God at any point, even after death, if I understand him correctly.
You could just as well say creates → observes → knows, instead of creates → knows → observes.
The cases are actually somewhat equivalent. If a person in 2010 has a revelation from God that he is going to take job A over job B in 2020, does he have a choice in 2020 about which to take? Even if he doesn’t have the revelation, an omniscient god has the power to give it to him.
Since God in the Bible can foretell the future, those in this thread who imagine a god who can’t do solve the problem at the expense of tossing the god most Christians believe in.
Christ won’t tell anyone when he is coming back, but supposedly he knows, after all.
But all Redshirts go to a farm upstate, and no one knows which ones get zapped and which ones get to retire.
But your theology is better than most I’ve seen.
I’ve frequently heard the first point - it puts all the blame on the person, not on God for not giving decent evidence. The atheists ignoring Aslan in The Last Battle are an example.
Did Lewis believe in the second point? Kind of makes faith useless, since you can change your mind after death when you finally get the evidence.
“Oh, so that is what God is? I’ll join up. Why didn’t you tell me before I died?”
I have seen some people who believed this, though.
I think he did. I might be mistaken. It’s a long time since I read anything of his.
I am pretty sure he is a works plus faith type person (i.e. faith alone is not enough, you need to act in a virtuous way). From his POV, it is much harder to suddenly embrace Christian values after death. If you are in Hell, the environment is not really conducive. Everyone is out to get you, you don’t have any support, nothing you do has much effect. If it was too hard to be a good person and believe in God when you were alive, how is being dead suddenly going to be different? If you didn’t recognise God on earth, why would you recognise him in the afterlife? We are getting a bit away from predestination though.
Yes, I always found this very unfair. Maybe Lewis thinks God provided enough evidence, or maybe he thinks you need to undergo a kind of spiritual refinement process to properly see God, that only works if you do it yourself (God can’t do it for you). That is an impression I often got from him.
Well, it’s not really my view; just a possible interpretation I’ve come up with. I like to idly speculate on the possibilities of theology in an infinite universe or multiverse; some of the possible consequences are unusual, to say the least. And it turns out that people like St Augustine, William of Ockham and Julian of Norwich have generally been there first.
The idea of a ‘multiverse existing inside an omniscient God’s head’ is largely inspired by Hindu thought, but I found a throwaway comment by C.S. Lewis intriguing; at one point Aslan tells Lucy that ‘you are never told what might have happened’. That suggested to me that Aslan does in fact know all the ‘might have beens’, but He is keeping that knowledge to himself. The Narnia books seem to imply an extensive, if not infinite, multiverse.
I do have many beefs with Lewis’s writings, however; his That Hideous Strength is a ghastly piece of bigoted and anti-scientific propaganda, and the Space Trilogy seems to imply that Humans shouldn’t leave the planet in case we pollute a universe which is already in a state of grace.
My take on it is some will work out their salvation after death.
One of my early criticism is didn’t Jesus conquer the grave and has the power to raise the dead? A power He shared through the Holy Spirit (Jesus commissioned his Twelve Apostles to raise the dead Peter and Paul also demonstrated this) So why is it eternal death for the person?
Also 1 Cor 10:13. (which due to differences in translations I’m posting the Young’s Literal Translation, which I regard as the greek when you don’t want to go to the greek due to the pleather of nuanced translations in regards to this.
- No temptation hath taken you – except human; and God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above what ye are able, but He will make, with the temptation, also the outlet, for your being able to bear [it].*
Interliner (Greek word for word) link:
https://biblehub.com/interlinear/1_corinthians/10-13.htm
May, describe another part in this redemption that may even extend to Hell/death, this indicates there is an outlet, or escape must exist and suffering will not be more than a person can take.
Plus it is nearly unreadable - unlike the first two books in the trilogy. The first was good, the second boring, but That Hideous Strength was awful.
As for multiple worlds, I’ll buy that some god could see it, but it makes that god’s interactions with humans kind of pointless. The ancient philosophers didn’t have the benefit of nearly 100 years of stories about this, though, so not surprising they didn’t think of all the issues.
but as Paul writes in Timothy " He who wills that all people shall have Life, and shall be converted to the knowledge of the truth
also, the Great Commission urges the Gospel to be preached to all, so if God “pre-condemned” us, why would he have us waste our time evangelizing?
And if that was the only opinion on the subject in the whole Bible you might have a point.
Is this supposed to be anti-universalist? Because I really like this as a pro for universalism. If God wills that all people have life (or “be saved” as in the NRSV), then why is God denied God’s wish? No one says that the knowledge of truth has to come before death after all.
Oh, and modern scholarship disputes it was Paul who wrote the Epistle to Timothy. I’m not casting it out of the canon, mind you. Just a good note.