Spurgeon speaks to it here:
Also missing from the discussion above is the fact of God’s omnitemporality, that ‘election’ and ‘predestination’ are words bound to sequential time, and God is not.
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Calvinism still holds that humans are responsible for their actions. Yes, determinism may sometimes promote thinking like “I can do anything I want now”, but such thinking does not necessarily follow from all forms of determinism, partial or complete. And all of the Calvinists that I know would hold that commands to follow God and not to sin are binding, whatever one’s status in regards to election.
Where is it claimed that this life is of no value?
The first of those positions would be held by all Calvinists that I know. The second would require some very precise definitions of what is meant by “good enough” which I have not done sufficient looking into to really be able to discuss well at the moment
Most individuals within Calvinism that I know would say that salvation is not justice, it is mercy, but that perdition is just, as all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
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Paul gives severe warnings and instructions for us to test ourselves. Anyone who thinks as you describe fails the test and has no assurance. There were apparently already ‘mere professors’ in the early church whom Paul was addressing and who had affirmed Christianity with their mouths but whose hearts had not been changed.
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I’ve been studying Luther lately.
Martin Luther briefly threw the philosophers out and Calvin unfortunately invited them right back in.
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Maybe @St.Roymond could help me out on this, about what the word ‘glory’ means there. That is an often cited verse among evangelists, but how can we ever attain God’s glory. What I think it means is that we are all inadequate in sufficiently boasting about who God is and fall short of glorifying our most prized possession, if we own that he is God, and that we are his, not boasting or preoccupied enough about our Lamborghini, so to speak.
If anyone may remember from my nephrectomy account cited above (God is sovereign over molecules and DNA), the verse 2 Corinthians 12:9 startled me:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.1
They are two different words in the Greek καυχάομαι (translated ‘boast’, but ‘glory’ in the KJV) and δόξης (‘doxēs’, translated as ‘glory’ in all versions). Doxēs sure looks like it’s not a stretch to infer it means to doxologize, to praise or boast about, glorifying.
1 “…so that God’s power may rest upon me does not mean I have supermanlike strength, but that his power rests over me like a strong shelter and I need not fear anything.
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I’m not well read enough to pick up your implication, so I guess I’m asking you to be more explicit, if you want. (I like philosophers – some, anyway. ; - )
Predestination as the Calvinists understand it is based on a certain philosophy of Time and God is placed within the confines of that philosophy, as you were alluding to with your comment about God being omnitemporal.
Although as an aside I think the “Omni” words to describe God are problematic in their entirety as they sneak in philosophical baggage suggesting to the hearer a conception of God as an object possessing some properties which is actually a very bad mistake.
For example “omnipresent” defines God as an object that exists at all points in all space.
But that is fundamentally wrong because in fact all points in space and time were created by and are currently sustained by, God.
So to say God is “there” is true, but not because he is “in” space but rather space is “in” him.
It’s come to my attention that the philosophy underlying the typical conception/visualization of God which theologists have worked so hard on is one of the main things that leads people to atheism!
Most people today, whether Theist or Atheist, conceive through a mental image, a philosophical-theological abstract God-object in a outer darkness"void" creating a universe beside himself, speaking as it comes into existence.
But in that conception it is all too easy, one might say diabolically easy, to simply delete God leaving one with a universe in a void.
But God doesn’t live in a dark void. But we know of someone who does…
All voids are created and sustained by God, as is the universe. The universe has no substance other than the words of God, and it’s continued existence is only by his continuing act of sustaining creation. “Through his Word all things were created and have their being”
Martin Luther said of philosophy: “One should learn Philosophy only as one learns witchcraft, that is to destroy it; as one finds out about errors, in order to refute them”
Only recently have I realized the truth of that. Science tells us true things and so does the Bible… but philosophy is where we run into problems.
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Certainly God possesses ‘properties’, attributes. Start with aseity – he is the only being who does. And we could not be created in his image unless he had imagable attributes – personhood and thus agency is a big one.
And the Bible speaks quite explicitly about his omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence – of course not with those labels, but neither is there anything inherently wrong with the labels.
But it does not limit him to that, and calling him an object in a physical sense is mistaken as well, so your ‘definition’ is in error.
Very well. I read it is in essence the kalam cosmological argument stated as a property of a object, that object being God.
The first problem (and this was part of my earlier point) is that God is not an object. Object implies substance, substance implies body and dimension, but God is Spirit and has no body.
It’s slippery because then someone may reflexively think “spirit stuff”, turning Spirit to spirit body and Object yet again.
There are certainly things we know about God which he has revealed to us, of course.
I do understand it doesn’t intend to limit him to that, but effectively it does, in the imaginations of many impressionable people.
They limit him not to “physical” space, mind you, but some kind of conceptual space… An abstract void, which he then fills entirely with his infinite Glory…
But it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.
Because the implicit void is there in the imagined conception and it contains God, yet God did not create it… And he can be removed from it.
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It depends how you define ‘object’. An object does ‘not’ have to be material substance. “That was his idea.” Idea is the predicate object, I believe it can be called – the predicate ‘thing’ or the predicate ‘being’, and it is not material. Similarly, “An idea is a thing.” Idea is the object of that sentence. Or if you are talking about something objectively, you are talking about facts that in themselves do not need to be physical. (Are we talking about philosophy objectively? ; - )
(Do you have trouble with the Nicene Creed?)
‘Essence’ is not meant to be taken as material, but it is meant to be taken as conceptual ’stuff’, not to be blasphemous.
So your understanding of the word object is too subjective. 
Not if explained adequately. (Or were you one of those people? ; - )
Nah.
I don’t imagine that at all. God is very separate from his creation but he is totally immanent in all aspects of it. (Would you like ‘omni-immanent’ better? But that sounds redundant repetitiously. ; - )
Now shall we talk about his omniscience or his omnipotence?
Big bang cosmology says that time and space had a beginning. That is not a void that contains God, it came from God and that fact has pointed many to believe in him.
Well, I took care not to implicate you specifically, But I know I used to think like that and a lot of former Christian atheists think like that as well. It is not a problem with the words necessarily but the image that they may create in people’s minds.
Because people don’t believe in the words themselves. They believe in the images and ideas that the words conjure up in their head.
So I think that perhaps being redundantly repetitious could be better than reducing these important ideas to single words of debatable definitions.
We need to agree what an object is. 
And similarly maybe thingness. Immanent is a good word.
Omnipotence would be next on my list as it brings us to the idea could God create a rock so big that he could not lift it.
This comes up because omnipotence emphasizes the ability to do all things, rather than the reality that nothing can be done apart from God. Even when we sin, we rely on God’s continuing sustenance of our lives and universe to carry out the act.
God cannot merely perform all actions, but all actions are performed by and through his will.
This is not merely a difference in emphasis though, it is a difference in kind, because while we perform actions on a world that God has created, God both creates that which is acted upon and then acts upon that which is created.
If God creates a rock, the rock does not exist apart from him, but this is precisely what the atheist line proposes.
God God could certainly make a rock that the human Jesus was unable to lift with his human strength, so in that case it is literally true that God could do that, but in a more general sense, god doesn’t lift rocks because concept of lifting would require God to have a body that exists in the same space as the rock, but that obviously isn’t the case because God has no body and does not exist in any space, rather all rocks, bodies and space exist by his word and he can make them movable or immovable as he wishes.
The version that we say in the church I go to which is a WELS church, reads " of one being with the father". I’m not sure which one is original or where you got that translation.
Imminent is a good word. It is much less physical sounding than present.
I am thinking about object in terms of a conceptual tool used to create a variable that is assigned properties and functions. This is how it is used in the field of computer programming with which I am familiar.
I believe that as thinkers we tend to use objects in the same way when we perform logical thought operations on them within our mind. We take something we would like to understand, such as a bird, and give it properties such as wings, and then functions such as flying. Flying. Then we can use that information to draw conclusions, such as if I throw a bird off of a cliff, will it survive?
Objects are a philosophical construct, which are a tool that we use to understand the world. World. I think that perhaps they are not useful in helping us to understand God, but rather attempting to do so can lead to wrong conclusions more often than not.
This is the one that got Calvin in trouble. Of course. If God knows everything then how could anyone ever make any choices especially when he is also omnipotent.
These words must be taken not as truth but as a shorthand for some kind of knowledge that the Bible gives us about God. But the problem is that that is not how theologians use them, they use them as variables and logical equations which allow them to drive ideas about God which are not exactly in the Bible as such.
In my readings of Martin Luther, which are fairly modest at present, he exhorts us time and time again to have the humility to accept that there are things about God that we don’t really understand and if we want to speculate it is important to remember that that is All we are doing.
If the evangelicals had followed that advice, we would not be in this mess with young earth creationism. But here we are.
I understand the desire to define God, but only God can do that, and he chose not to use a lot of these theological terms which were subsequently invented and elevated to the status of truth.
But because they are human terms they are flawed, just as the conclusions of science are never truly final.
You can continue to use the terms if you wish. I don’t think that would make you a heretic or anything, I would just like to point out that they are not really helpful to the modern debate landscape because they have a lot of philosophical baggage which can in the worst cases completely lead people down the wrong path.
At the end of the day Jesus says to come to him as a child, and complex theological constructs are not only unnecessary but probably counterproductive.
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Most Calvinists are inconsistent. Calvin’s view of salvation isn’t just at all; his is a capricious God who decides who goes to hell and who doesn’t (which is also bad Christology).
Luther was content to let a mystery be a mystery, something he shared with the East. Calvin was a lawyer who wanted everything tidy, no mysteries allowed.
Personally, I call those liberals. Always wanting everyone to live like them and nowadays, when you disagree they go from tolerant to vitriolic, and start spewing emotional blackmail and attempt to cancel them.
Maybe it doesn’t fit any of the platitudes and ideals we set up, but a mercy killing is sometimes a part of real life to me. If hell really is truly a place of self harm and self torture for “eternity,” I personally can’t really understand a loving creator allowing that. Maybe he does. Not a fan if so.
The conservative mindset I am familiar with usually interprets God as not being able to look upon Jesus on the cross when he takes on our sin and says “My God my God, why have you abandoned me.” I find that very disagreeable. Jesus was also fully God at the time so He couldn’t look upon Himself? It leads to all sorts of problems. I think Jesus just felt what it was like to be completely abandoned by all he held dear. But yes, many have this idea of God’s justice not permitting various things. I don’t have a “theology of God’s justice” so I can’t fully agree or disagree with what you wrote. I do think that a lot of people just make things up about God by proof-text hunting scripture in adherence with what they think they know of ancient Greek philosophy though. Clearly Jesus spent time with sinners. But note he said, it is not the well who need a doctor.
I also think God does have a “problem” with sinners. More specifically, unrepentant sinners. At least that is the message I get from scripture and Jesus. God wants sinners to repent.
I concur. Sin is self-destructive and to a degree separates us from God (on our end) which is itself very self destructive. That is my point. If having God and not having God in your life made no real difference, why are we here on this forum? For me, my faith in God orients my entire life.
Intellectually, I don’t find the moral problem of evil overly difficult. Problematic in some ways yes. Emotionally, it is hard for sure. But I think the free-will defense does a good job. For me it is natural evil that is the real and emotional intellectual problem.