Is God good?

But that is NOT Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution or have anything to do with Darwin's Theory of Evolution and certainly nothing to do with whether or not God is good?It's amazing to me that those of you who claim to be Biblical based don't respond to the actual topic.The Bible has passages that says God is good. It also has passages that says God is an evil murderous tyrant.The response you folk should be posting is that the Bible supports both positions, that God is good and God is evil.

You know, I don't think he was either a Christian or a biologist; I think he was an oportunistic, clever, psychopathic, megolamaniac with a plan.

I responded to the first part of this post on the Catholicism thread because it is not on topic here. This is the rest of that post by JAR: By asking the man why he called him good he is not rejecting the term but calling his attention to its implication.
Here are a couple examples of this way of understanding the sentence as I have said I understand it:David Guzik Commentary at Blue Letter Bible says:' He is saying Jesus is God if he is willing to own that he is good. Jesus would not have made an issue of such an ordinary polite way of addressing him if that wasn't his objective.Matthew Henry at Blue Letter Bible says: You are of course free to disagree with these commentaries, but don't stupidly deny that your disagreement is also an OPINION, a different interpretation of the scripture and not scripture itself.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Faith, I quoted Jesus. I did not interpret anything. Which of us is doing the interpretation? According to the author of Matthew did it say what I quoted?

If you don't know what the theory of evolution is, I suggest that you don't try to discuss it.

But that's like telling a blind man that the reason I can see is my retina. It still doesn't enable him to see the difference between red and green.

Really? Well, "About God, and Christ, and the Spirit, and sin, and their own hearts, and faith, and repentance, and necessity of holiness, and the value of the Bible, and the importance of prayer, and the resurrection, and judgment to come" just about covers it. Let me give you some examples.About the Spirit, some Pentecostals will maintain that those with the Spirit speak in tongues, and conversely those who don't speak in tongues don't have the Spirit.About God, and about sin, we have just been discussing the differences between Calvinists and Arminians. According to Calvin, God plans the details of each sinner's sin and makes him carry it out by an act of positive will; a man like Wesley (for example) regards this as a shocking impiety; the difference does not strike me as negligible.About salvation, and about "necessity of holiness", look up on the internet about "Lordship Salvation" and "Free Grace". I may add that the Free-Gracers seem to me to be as nasty a bunch of people as you could meet in a day's walk, but then by their principles there's no reason why they shouldn't be.Or again on the subject of salvation, look up the dispute about OSAS ("once saved always saved", essentially the fifth point of Calvinism).About "the judgement to come", see how much unity you can find between the premillennialist, the postmillennialist, and the amillennialist.About "the value of the Bible" --- have you never met a King James Onlyist?I could go on, but you get the point.Now, the guy whom you quote says that in the church, outside of which there is no salvation, there is unanimity on these subjects. Either he is grossly overestimating the unity of Christendom, or there are just a handful of sects, perhaps only one, in which salvation is to be found. And if it turns out to be the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, then that'll be rather hard on the rest of you.

It's been brought up enough times by now that this is off topic so I don't want to answer it here. It's also off topic on the Catholicism thread, so I'm not sure what to do with it.

OK, Faith, since this IS a relevant point, does "THE Church" go for the extreme versions of the Sovereignty of God or does it accept human free will ? Or does it believe in either depending on what happens to be convenient to you at the time ?

I don't see how this is any more on topic myself.Answer: None of the above."THE Church" includes lots of different denominations which have lots of different theologies about this question, everything from extreme Arminianism to extreme Calvinism. The question does not affect salvation. They are all within THE Church.

Except that according tot he chap you quoted, the church is in unanimous agreement "about God, and Christ, and the Spirit, and sin, and their own hearts, and faith, and repentance, and necessity of holiness, and the value of the Bible, and the importance of prayer, and the resurrection, and judgment to come". Whereas the various Protestant sects are not.

Well the distinction is important for any theodicy, which is what we're talking about. You can't use the Free Will defence if you believe that all our actions are decreed by God. You can't even argue that anyone, ever, fails to follow God's Will. At least not honestly.

OK, off topic or not, I'll answer this: But they are. ALL the denominations that are true denominations agree on these "weightier matters" as Bishop Ryle referred to them. I went through the list this way: But they all believe that the Spirit is necessary to salvation and that the Spirit is given to believers, and all claim to HAVE the Spirit, so if some accuse others of not having the Spirit that's a secondary issue, we still all agree on the necessity of the Spirit.We do agree about the Spirit as a matter of principle. I just answered this for PaulK. I don’t regard any of the in-house disagreements to be negligible but they usually don't put a particular theology outside the family. In this case all agree that sin is the enemy of God, that sin is the reason Christ died for us, because sin condemns us to Hell for eternity. The differences in the theologies about the origtinal causes of sin, the degree of God’s sovereignty and so on, do not affect that basic unity of belief even if some weaker Christians go so far as to reject others for beliefs they are unable to understand.Again, I’d say we all agree on the main PRINCIPLE. I'm aware of the dispute and think some of the Free Gracers may go far enough to be called heretics and not Christians at all, but they wouldn't deny the necessity of holiness, they'd just consider it to be a part of sanctification as a separate grace from justification, something one grows into after salvation rather than a part of salvation. This is because they regard it as a "work" which denies "salvation by grace alone." It's like those who think "repentance" is a work, which I discussed somewhere in the last few days. BUT they all nevertheless adhere to the same Solas for salvation and they certainly don't reject the need to grow in holiness. If they do, then they are apostates and not Christians.They may consider their opponents outside the camp but I think like the tongues people they'll be surprised in the end. I consider their belief wrong but I don't think it necessarily puts them outside the camp since they have a basic faith in Christ's dying for sin, so I’m going to say again that there is no disunity on the basic PRINCIPLES of salvation and holiness. Again you are talking about a borderline case where those who think we can lose our salvation may at a certain extreme be apostates. Bishop Ryle, whom you are arguing with, was Reformed or at least in sympathy with Reformed views, so he would disagree with this, but I'm not sure whether he'd reject it all as nonChristian. He might. Much of it has sprung up since his time.So again I'd say it's a matter of a theological weakness that doesn’t split us on the weightier matter of HOW we are saved, which is by grace through faith in Christ. But this is very clearly a secondary issue that does not keep us from Christian unity. We all agree that there is a judgment to come, and that's the "weightier matter" we agree on, we merely disagree on when it will occur. This is basically Sola Scriptura. We all agree that the Bible is our authority and that we don’t answer to a Magisterium or papal decrees. I'm not KJV-only because they superstitiously treat it as perfection in itself and I believe it needs periodic updating, which they consider to be heresy, but I am also against all the modern versions because I believe the underlying Greek is corrupt and that instead of having dozens of new translations to confuse things we should have had a modest updating of the KJV. So I disagree with both camps, but they all nevertheless agree on the value of the Bible as ultimate authority and that is the fundamental unity Ryle is talking about.And on this one I conclude again that we agree in PRINCIPLE: the Bible is our authority. After pondering your list I still read that quote and think yes, that describes THE Church, and the unity on "weightier matters" among us although you have pointed out some important disagreements among us that explain the many denominations among us at least. Ryle spoke for majority Christians in his day, and I think he still does, the question is whether the disputes you have mentioned put anyone outside the camp or not. My conclusion on all these is NO except perhaps at some extremes which are not defined.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

All I care about is Biblical theology, not theodicy, and I normally avoid this debate because it gets beyond me quite rapidly. But as a general principle human free will is actually not at all in conflict with God's sovereignty over all things. That's a paradox you could say, something about the nature of God and reality that's beyond our figuring out, so I don't try. If your theodicy requires the either/or that's a debate that doesn't interest me.

If you're not interested in theodicy, why are you posting to this thread, where theodicy is THE central issue ?And if you can't see the conflict between asserting that humans are morally responsible for their actions and that their actions are dictated by God's will I have to say that you have a very serious problem.