GDR
Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: 05-22-2005 Member Rating: 2.2
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Porkincheese writes: God knows what's going to happen to me tomorrow. He knows when your going to sin, when you'll die, he knows the future. Correct me if I'm wrong but that's how I remember it. I agree that you can get that reading from an inerrantist view of the Bible. I however don't believe that God does know the future in the way that we think of it as I believe that the future is unknowable. One of my Christian influences is John Polkinghorne who was a renowned physicist and changed his career path in his late 40's to theology. Here is a portion of an interview he gave a few years ago.
quote:
MS. TIPPETT: I think you also bring your theology and your science together interestingly in seeing that there's also something going on in the world, and including human beings' interaction with nature at any given time, that there are sort of competing freedoms. I think that's a very interesting, complex idea. DR. POLKINGHORNE: Yeah. Well, I think we live in a world of true becoming. That's to say, I don't think that the future is fixed; I don't think God fixed it. I think God allows creatures to be themselves. MS. TIPPETT: Does God know it? DR. POLKINGHORNE: If we live in a world of true becoming so that we play our little parts in making the future and I believe God's providence also plays a part in making the future, and also the laws of nature that God has ordained play a part in constraining the form of the future if that's the sort of world in which we live, then I think actually even God doesn't know the future. And that's not an imperfection, because the future is not yet there to be known. Now, that's a very controversial view, and not everybody, by any matter of means MS. TIPPETT: We'll let you have it here. DR. POLKINGHORNE: has agreed with me about that, but that's how it seems to me. And I think that, you see, there's been a very important development in theological thinking in the 20th century, and it's reflected in all sorts of quite different theologians, but they have this thing in common: They see that the act of creation, the act of bringing into being a world in which creatures are allowed to be themselves, to make themselves, is an act of love and it is an act of divine self-limitation. The theologians like to call it kenosis from the Greek word, and so that God is not the puppet master of the universe, pulling every string. God has taken, if you like, a risk. Creation is more like an improvisation than the performance of a fixed score that God wrote in eternity. And that sort of world of becoming involves God's accepting limitations, and I believe, accepting limitations not knowing the future. That doesn't mean, of course, that God will be caught out by the future in the same way that you and I are. I mean, God can see how history is moving, so to speak, but God has to react to the way history moves. Now, that makes, to me, quite a lot of sense about the world.
Here is a link to the whole interview which I think addresses many of your questions.
John Polkinhorne interview Hope this helps.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by Porkncheese, posted 11-10-2018 11:10 AM | | Porkncheese has not replied |
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