What Frank?
ARCHIVE: Open Theism part 1
- Thread starter ChristisKing
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God said He is a jealous God. That's pretty emotional if you ask me. Look at what He did to various idolators and what He said about them. I do believe He made a point here -- a very emotional one which tends to preclude the above-it-all and aloof view proposed by Augustine.
elected4ever
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God is life. One cannot be alive and not have emotion. Even dumb animals have emotion. When God repented that he had made man is not the same thing as when man repents. It is just that God felt sorrow for the man that He had created. He gets angry and vengeful at the evil a man does. God intended for us to know that. He also wonted us to know that he is long suffering, loving and generous. God is not aloof from it all and that as we act so does He. This does not mean that God changed His mind about man or that God does not know. If God did not know, then why reveal that He had made provision from the foundation of the world. It is not God who changes His mind but man who changes. It is not that God does not know but that it is man that does not know. God knows and man does not. God is reliable. Man is not. That is why salvation is of God and not of man. If God changes, then man can have no confidence in God that He will keep his word. That is why the god of the OVer is no better than any pagan god in history. It is religion according to man as man has practiced it from ages past and has changed God in the heart of man from real to a false god. From a real God to that of myth.Frank Ernest said:
Really? Are you sure? Does an Earthworm have emotion? How about a bacterium or the cells that make up the muscle fibers in my left leg? They are definately alive. Do they have emotion? In fact it would seem that the lower the life form the less likely it is that it has emotion and yet Calvinists insist that God is impassible like worms and gutter slime.elected4ever said:
Had He always felt sorrow? Did He not see His creation and say "it is very good" just a few chapters earlier? That sounds like a change of mind to me! Isn't that what the word repent means, to change one's mind?
Nice preaching but its self-contradictory nonsense. Your own words have already proven that God does change His mind. That is unless you think He was lying when He said that He was pleased with His creation and that it was "very good". Was God being long suffering when He flooded the whole place out? Or had His patience come to an end? It can't be both. God had either decided to continue being patient and please or had decided enough was enough and got angry enough to do something about it.
Your premise is faulty and so therefore your conclusion is false. A proper premise would be that if God's character changes then He could not be trusted to keep His word, but His character does not change and open theism does not teach that it changes nor would I accept it as truth if it did.
Resting in Him,
Clete
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seekinganswers
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Your understanding of "knowledge" is a very Greek one. The Greeks understood knowledge as a entity that came to us passively through the senses. This is not what knowledge signifies in the scriptures (and especially not in Hebrew). To know something in Hebrew means to affect it. It does not signify a passive entrance of that knowledge to us through the senses, but indicates a power to shape, to mold, and to act. When God "knows" good and evil, it does not mean that God simply can discern it. It means that God enacts the good that God sees fit to enact. To know good and evil is not to be a sage of it, but to be one who determines, who sets it into place. Good cannot be distinguished from the embodiment of that God. Abstractions are useless as far as the Hebrews were concerned.
So for God to "know" the future has nothing to do with a passive receiving of knowledge. God knows the future as the actant in Creation who drives the Creation to its proper telos in God. This is the absurdity of both the Open view and of Calvinism, because they both attempt to understand God within the framework of the Enlightenment, which is nothing more than a mythology of the Modern Nation-state.
Peace,
Michael
So for God to "know" the future has nothing to do with a passive receiving of knowledge. God knows the future as the actant in Creation who drives the Creation to its proper telos in God. This is the absurdity of both the Open view and of Calvinism, because they both attempt to understand God within the framework of the Enlightenment, which is nothing more than a mythology of the Modern Nation-state.
Peace,
Michael
elected4ever
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Beautifully Put :BRAVO: :first:seekinganswers said:
Agape4Robin
Member
Well said SA........:BRAVO:seekinganswers said:
seekinganswers said:
This sounds like it could be consistent with Calvinism (determinism) or Open Theism (God providentially guides His Story to ultimate fulfillment without controlling or determining every moral and mundane choice along the way...He created others with significant freedom to contribute or to resist His purposes).
Agape4Robin
Member
:rotfl:godrulz said:
Okay everyone: IN UNISON...seekinganswers said:
SAYING IT DOESN'T MAKE IT SO!
My standard of truth is not Hebrew idioms, manners of thinking or tradition but the plain reading of the text of Scripture. If you would like to establish the relevance of this nonsense with Scripture and sound reason I invite you to do so. Otherwise, I am not interested in your simple opinions.
Further, word play doesn't impress me one little bit. There are several words that can mean what we Gentiles commonly refer to as knowledge and the word knowledge can carry several meanings including that of sexual relations (which is also a Biblical use of the term, by the way). The Bible uses terms like 'understanding' and 'wisdom' to refer to knowledge as well and so to suggest that Hebrews knew nothing of what you refer to as Greek understanding of knowledge is disingenuous at best. The point being that the sort of knowledge we are talking about doesn't have to mean what you are suggesting even in a Hebrew's head.
Further still, the sort of knowledge that you say is Greek cannot be escaped. Notice your own wording...
"Your understanding of "knowledge" is a very Greek one."
My understanding of knowledge vs. a Hebrew understanding of knowledge. You say there is a Greek idea of knowledge and a Hebrew idea. I'm wondering which you are referring to when you use the word "understanding" in this sentence.
That is somewhat of an obscure point but let me just say it bluntly. When I speak of knowledge I'm speaking of logical certainty in whatever form. If you would like to get into a discussion about epistemology then I would be happy to oblige but I don't think you'd be up for it. The simple fact is that logic cannot be escaped. The fact that the Greeks wrote about it and even formalized it does not mean that they invented it or even discovered it. Indeed, God is the God of logic and theology is the 'logos of the theos' and cannot be done rightly apart from sound reason whether one is a Hebrew, or a Greek.
Resting in Him,
Clete
There are OT Hebrew words for knowledge and NT Greek words for knowledge. There may be similarities and differences. The Holy Spirit chose Koine Greek to inspire the revelation of God in the New Covenant. The language has nuances that are more precise than many other languages (e.g. more than one word for love). The writers used Greek words like 'logos', but expanded and changed it to convey Christian truth. It still retained some of the original Greek ideas. We should not pit Hebrew against Greek, but see both as part of the full, progressive revelation of God. Clete is correct that it is an exegetical fallacy to assume any word has a limited meaning. Context, culture, time periods, etc. all affect the nuanced interpretations.
seekinganswers
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Clete said:
Your "god" is an idol. God is not a God of logic and thelogy, but is the God of the Jews YHWH, which means God is whomever God wishes to be. We do not set the limits on God, nor can we force God to come to us on any certain terms. God remains free, and we are slaves of God.
If you will actually look at the New Testament closely, you will find a Greek that is not being used in a Greek way, but with a Hebrew mindset. The verb akouo does not mean to hear (as in to passively receive sound) but it means also to obey. Hrema does not simply mean word, but is like the Hebrew (davar) which means word or saying but also means matter or thing. What one hears is not heard unless it is obeyed; what one says means nothing unless it is actualized.
You have done wrong to transfer the Hellenistic understanding of the world into the scriptures. It is rather the other way around. Greek thought does not infiltrate the scriptures, but the scriptures reinterpret the Greeks.
Logic has no power whatsoever. What is logical cannot drive the way the world is. God cannot be understood in logic. The logos of the scriptures cannot be equated with the logos of hellinistic culture. The reason for this is that in the scriptures logos becomes flesh and dwells among us, so that for Christians there cannot be an abstraction of God's work in the world, but it is always embodied (in Christ). The logic of the Greeks is in no way reflective of God, for their logic brings about a body which is in contrast to God and is idolatrous. Those who try to understand Christ in an abstract way will never know Christ. For to know is not simply to passively understand, but is active and embodied.
We are coming to odds in our epistemology but I think at the root of it our ontological frameworks are what differ. You have accepted the Enlightenment's dualistic ontology on this matter and I have wholeheartedly rejected it. You accept the division of the human being into body and soul, and you will group soul and God in the same category (in that both souls and God are eternal). This is really a Neo-platonic understanding of the world that the church never grabs hold of very well (at least in the first thousand years). The church's liturgy would make it quite impossible to accept neo-platonic philosophy in full. The dualism of body and soul has its roots in Greek philosophy (and is at the core of the first major Christian conflict with heresy). The gnostics understood the world in a fiercly dualistic manner. Bodies were prisons for the soul, and the desire was to escape that prison. In this understanding the flesh became evil and the soul good. But Christians would never embrace this view of the world, for flesh is not evil; if such a claim were true, then the God of Creation would be an evil God. The God of Creation, however, is never to be made distinct from the God revealed in Chirst, and this is what was made clear in the early controversy stirred up by Marcion who desired to remove the God of Creation from Christianity altogether.
Now you are no gnostic, but at the core of your understanding of the world is a foundation that is very much the same as the gnostic's. What is set before us has no reality in itself. We only observe what is around us in order to abstract it into some universal concept, i.e. logic. But logic cares little about real application of knowledge. The mathematical system is a good example, where we discover that the logical world is some mythical reality that has no practicality in a praxis. Physics attempts to give it an application, but the understanding of the world must always be embodied over and over again (made particular and not allowed to remain abstract).
The Hebrews have a much more realistic worldview than do the Greeks. The division of reality is placed between God and Creation (rather than between soul and body). With this understanding, there is no illusion of an eternal and universal good within the Creation. Eternity and universality remain in God (not in a logical principle of the universe). The universe without God is very much in deteroration. We are mortal, and our reality will pass away. There is nothing eternal in us. We are mortal, and all that we have and are will be taken from us in the end. The only eternity we might have must be grounded in Christ, who leads us back to the God of Creation. God cannot be understood in logic. God can only be known in Christ. "No one has ever seen God. It is God the only son, who is in the bosom of the Father who has made God known" (John 1:18).
We do not know God in some abstraction of logic; we only know God in the face of Christ.
Peace,
Michael
Clete defends Open Theism and stands against the Hellenistic, pagan Greek influences on Christianity (Platonic, Augustinian, etc.). We acknowledge the Hebraic roots of Christianity and the errors of much of Greek philosophy. I think you are attacking a straw man and do not really understand what we believe.
Agape4Robin
Member
Au, contraire...........I think he does.godrulz said:
seekinganswers
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godrulz said:
You have obviously not studied the New Testament Greek very well. It does not retain the hellenistic ways of the Greek language. The Greek of the New Testament remains close to the Hebrew. Words like logos do not take up their hellenistic understanding of the world; they are rather empitied of their meaning to be imbued with something much more hebraic.
Hebrew and English and many other languages have different words for love. Charity was a word for love from Old English. The reason we have lost it is that we have so easily embraced an idolatrous understanding of love that we will then try to apply to God. I would like to understand how the agape is of any useto us when we translate it with a word that has such various meanings as "I love my father," "I love my car," "I make love," and "all you need is love." God's revelation to the world is not embodied in the Greek, but rather is embodied in Christ, and in Christ's body, the church. Please do not lecture me on exegetical fallacies, because what I am saying is not exigetical by any means but is a heurmeneutical framework for the scriptures. Those who interpret the scriptures must be grounded in a way of life that is distinct from the world if we are to read them rightly. If we do not, then we turn the scriptures into nothing more than a coopted mythology for the project of the liberal-democratic nation-state.
This is my position, as Stanley Hauerwass puts it in his book Unleashing the Scriptures, the church’s “task” is “to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America.” For until we have done this the scriptures will be chained to the foreign will of the state and its project to democratize the world and embed individuals in the global economy. Or as Bonhoeffer puts it, they will be nothing more than a pastime of the church as the church embraces a cheapened grace.
Peace,
Michael
seekinganswers
New member
godrulz said:
This is not true if Clete embraces the project of the Enlightenment and a dualistic understanding of humanity in body and soul.
(And how about we let Clete speak for himself)
Peace,
Michael
seekinganswers
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godrulz said:
And what conclusions have I jumped to? Are you saying that you do not hold to the Enlightenment's view of the world? Have you not claimed that God can be understood from the very framework of the Creaion?
Peace,
Michael
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