Predestined to Damnation?

HP: Your reasoning starts and stops with the false notion that if it happens it must have a cause, and that cause must be the product of force or coercion. You exhibit no conception whatsoever of the nature of morality, love and benevolence or sin and selfishness. If there is a ‘driving cause,’ in the sense of force or coercion, no moral blame or praise can be predicated of any action. To think you can place moral praise or blame where the action is the result of force or coercion is sheer folly.

The whole idea of personal moral responsibility must be non-existent in your mind, for you live in a necessitated world. Placing personal moral blame for ones actions would be the height of ignorance to you, would it not?

 

Eric, Webdog, and the list, can a man hold to predestination of the elect without holding to the predestination of the damned?

 

Originally Posted by Heavenly Pilgrim
Eric, Webdog, and the list, can a man hold to predestination of the elect without holding to the predestination of the damned?

HP: Would I be correct in stating that you believe in the predestination of the damned? I have thought that is your belief although I have never asked you directly that I remember.

If your remarks in this post are to be seen as stating that one cannot hold to predestination of the elect without holding to the predestination of the damned, I would agree with your conclusion as posted.

 

HP: This is hard for me to imagine you saying due to your views of predestination. How could anything be a test that was preordained to happen, in that it must of necessity come to pass? Test of what? If no other possibility existed but for that which indeed did come to pass, what you call a test was about as much of a test as it would be to test gravity by dropping a steel ball off of a building. Since when was a test needed or useful in establishing a necessitated an act one knows is absolutely necessitated?? If Christ had to do as he did due to necessitated fate, any thought of Him going through a test would have been meaningless rhetoric. You pass every notion you come to through the biased lens of the false notion that if God foreknows something will happen it must of necessity come to pass.

The same goes for the notion that you mention concerning Satan. How could he had anything to do with his actions if in fact they as well were necessitated to happen?? Satan could not be the author of necessitated fate, so once again we have God as designing and necessitating the actions of Satan himself. The picture you paint is a puppet show of evil with God pulling the strings necessitating evil to take place.

HP: Again, the whole idea of learning obedience is a complete farce in your scheme of things, for what you call learning is nothing more than predestinated fate. Your idea of learning involves as much efffort as a rock would exhibit in learning its way to the ground as it is kicked off a cliff.

HP: The following is what you mean to imply. Man’s will is the necessitated fate of the eternal purpose of God that was necessitated to be as it is from eternity past. ‘Man’s will,’ according to GE, is nothing other than simply a code word for necessitated fate used to confuse the listener as to the real idea he holds, which is the total and complete predestination of all acts, i.e. fatalistic determination.

HP: Here we have the fatalism GE holds to unveiled for all to see. No man, including Christ Himself, has or will do anything other than they were programmed by necessitated fate by God to do, and that from eternity past. Any notion concerning man having a ‘will’ stated by GE, in any way expressing a choice or ability to control their intents and subsequent actions, is nothing short of a chimera. What he denotes as a will is no will at all, but rather the mere forced actions of necessitated fate.

 

HP: When we view God’s foreknowledge as ours is bound, to those things of necessity and necessity alone, (which is what the Calvinists or the Baptists I know do) if God foreknows it it must of necessity come to pass.

This again overlooks the truth IMO that God’s infinite foreknowledge is not like unto our finite foreknowledge, i.e. bound to things only of necessity, but rather is higher than our, in that He knows matters of perfect choice as well as those things necessitated o come to pass.

Let me illustrate for those having difficult time understanding all this jargon. If I held in my hand a coin in an environment in which when releasing my hand the coin had the distinct possibility of going up as well as down, there is no way we could foreknow with absolute precision which way it would go, due to the fact our foreknowledge can only foreknow matters that of necessity would come to pass. If, in the environment we now live in with gravity present, we can know with absolute certainty that if we dropped the coin in our hand, that it would go straight down. Why? Because gravity demands that it of necessity falls downward. Our foreknowledge can be absolute when focusing on things of necessity. It can be rightfuly said that our foreknowledge as finite beings is limited to te foreknowledge of things of necessity alone.

God’s foreknowledge is far greater than ours, in that He can foreknow matters of perfect choice as well as those things of necessity. If the coin, in the environment of perfect choice, could go up as well as down, God could know with the same absolute perfection as he knows matters of necessity, in what direction such an object would travel even before it did.

When we say that if something comes to pass, that God foreknows and that due to that foreknowledge it of necessity must happen, we are limiting God’s abilities to that of ours by filtering our thoughts through the lens of our finite human abilities and understanding. God is not, nor can be, limited by such human inability to foreknow matters of perfect choice. Every notion of morality, love, selfishness, evil or good, relies on the fact that choice to form our intents are not only possible but absolutely necessary.

If one necessitates the intents of men, by believing that because God foreknows the outcome it must of necessity come to pass, no morality on the part of man can be predicated of any actions. No notion of an intent or subsequent action could be denoted as blameworthy or praiseworthy on the part of man, for God would of necessity be the only cause of it. This clearly destroys all personal accountability for any and all such intents or subsequent actions. God alone could be blamed or all the wickness perpetrated upon this universe.