Is Christ cruel? (For member Schrafinator)

Perhaps it's both. Here's my scriptural evidence: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you . . ."See? Both.As regards the problem of free will, there is always Calvin's answer: God is outside of time and therefore does not FORESEE you doing anything. He just sees you doing it in the eternal present.

That's right. There is only now. He knows everything in the present but he doesn't FOREKNOW anything. There's nothing to foreknow.I think Boethius said this, 4th or 5th century, before Calvin did. So we have a tradition here.

He does not know that certain people WILL die as atheists. He just sees them dying as atheists at the same time that he sees them being born and the universe being created. He's not making them do it; He's just watching them.Hence, they have free will.It's an answer to the question, if God foreknows all, then we have no free will. But he doesn't foreknow anything.

Yes. But the question that the God-out-of-time idea was supposed to answer was, how, if God has FOREknowledge, can we possibly have free will?We come to a fork in the road, and we can choose fork A or fork B. According to the God-in-time idea, God knows that we will choose fork A. Therefore, how can we possibly choose fork B? Therefore, we have no free will.But if God is outside of time, He does not know ahead of time what we are going to do. There is no "ahead of time." So we have free will.Now the other problem is, why did God create Schraf in the first place, knowing that she would be an atheist? But by phrasing it this way, we have jumped back into time again. Even God cannot know what does not exist: and what does not exist--in God's Reality--is the past or the future.And, yes, this view is supposed to be compatible with omnipotence and creation.

I agree the concept of something being outside of time is confusing, to say the least. One might argue that a time-bound being can have no concept of eternity (i.e,--absence of time). But the idea is meant to explain how God could know everything we are "going to do" (from our point of view) and yet we also have free will.As far as your point that God "has no idea of the effects of his actions," I think I would phrase it a little differently:God knows everything but the only thing there is to know is the eternal present. There are no "effects," for to have an effect is to be in time.As the poet said, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."So we have "space-time"--an illusion.

I think, Ifen, you have taken my words out of context. People do not have free will because God is watching them; people have free will, according to this doctrine, because their choices are not fore-ordained in the everlasting Now.

I'm not a conservative Christian. I'm not even a Christian.I was just putting forth a doctrine I had read about, which was interesting to me. I wanted to see what others thought about it.I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that.But I do feel I am correct in my interpretation of Boethius.

I was going on the assumption that how it is perceived by God is the reality. Our version of it is not the reality. Our version is a distortion, and so we come up with ideas of "unfairness."I agree that "eternal present" is odd, to say the least.But if God were in time he would also have to be in space ("space-time"), which also seems odd. If He were in space He would be corporeal, which does not seem quite right.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 06-02-2005 05:03 PM