Calvinism and fatalism?

Let me answer clearly for the Calvinists using their way of speaking:

The barefoot boy with his boots on stood sitting there. Round squares! 2=2=3! Giant twerp! On again, off again, gone again, Flanagan!

 

how is prophecy not fatalism?

 

From the London Baptist Confession 1689. It's the "yet so as" phrase that makes it not fatalism.

 

How is prophecy not fatalism? Simple..it is based on foreknowledge, not foreordination. Rightly dividing to the rescue!

 

So God did not plan for Christ to be crucified. He just predicted it would happen.

 

Ok. here's my answer: I believe God's omnipotence allows for him to effectively save those whom He's redeemed, and his omniscience allows him to do it in a way that doesn't turn men into automatons.

Define fatalism in your view and I'll get back to you.

God bless.

Dan

 

Natters,

Do you believe that God, in his omniscience, knew all events that would take place before he created the world?

If so, then how are those events not unalterable and inevitable?

 

I was pointing to this part:

Things occur through the freedom of second causes, and those second causes are not necessitated by God's decrees.

In the same way that you are claiming that God's foresight of an event makes it certain, but not necessary; this confession claims that God's forethought (or foreplanning) of an event makes it certain but not necessary.

 

That doesn't help though.

The point of my question is to demonstrate that any view apart from open theism (where God doesn't know the future) has the same problem. If you call it "fatalism" that is fine. You have the problem too.

No.

 

Fatalism is a distinctively negative connotation. God's plans in human history have a purpose that is not fatalistic.

 

I'm not sure how you are defining "inevitable", but I don't think that the second causes are inevitable as I define it. They will happen certainly, but not inevitably.

Let me give you an example from Acts 27, when Paul is going to be shipwrecked. And angel of God tells him:

In other words, God's plans include the necessity (You must) of Paul standing for certain before Caesar, and God has also decided to save the lives of all those sailing with Paul. And that's the way things will happen, as Paul says,

Nevertheless, when some of the sailors decided to escape the ship in a lifeboat, Paul tells the the centurion and the soldiers,

God saving all those with Paul was contingent on all of them staying with the ship, so that if they hadn't, they wouldn't have been saved. They had real options with real consequences. God's saving them all wasn't "inevitable" in the sense that it would happen no matter what, yet it was certain as part of God's plan--he had already given Paul the lives of those with him.