Christians and doubt

The best I’ve read on this.

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Anyone is free to believe whatever they want, but that does not make it true.

Can you recommend any conversations between the author and a thoughtful conservative? Someone like John Walton, Michael Horton, J.P. Moreland, Tremper Longman, Michael Heiser, Craig Keener, Jamie Smith, etc.

(btw I once read a neat article about how Moreland could be the best conservative theologian/apologist to have a conversation with Joe Rogan)

I can fully recommend his entire oeuvre as being a conversation from a thoughtful conservative with thoughtful conservatives. Which is why he is no longer conservative. And neither am I. I reacted extremely negatively to him as I read him. Personally. But the avalanche of deconstruction could not be stopped. He reconstructs as he goes too. I lag there.

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Tell me the secret then so ican do the same. If there is any

It has to do with knowing the knowable God.
 

He who is having my commands, and is keeping them, that one it is who is loving me, and he who is loving me shall be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.
John 14:21

 
I guess you start by trusting others’ testimonies about God in their lives (including the testimonies from scripture) – that he is a faithful and trustworthy Father, until you have your own undeniable evidence. Then you can be at peace if you have become his child, knowing that he is in control, and absolutely. Maggie, Rich Stearns, Georg Müller, Glenn Morton, yours truly and many many more. The evidence does not have to be objective external third party verifiable as it was in those examples, it can also be internal (but still objective and compelling – it is not just about feelings). Francis Collins, Phil Yancey, and Sy Garte are among those. Just yesterday we learned here of another in @Mervin_Bitikofer’s new topic, René Gerard, in a very cool interview.

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Trust all the mutually exclusive testimonies or only the Christian ones that agree with whatever theology you adhere to? #doubt

Maybe we can arrive at generic belief in a loving or caring God from this, but I see no way to narrow this down further.

Vinnie

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Truth cannot be known I take it.

You still haven’t.

The Bible tells us we need to be born again. The text, at least according to my interpretation, does not mean being pulled out of a womb a second time. It serves as a metaphor and if you can be born twice I’m not sure why you can’t be unbirthed metaphorically speaking? And some people disown their biological children. Do you have some specific verses in mind? The mere terms unbirthed/adopted don’t tell us one way or the other. And even if your interpretation of those terms is correct, there are all the warnings which suggest the opposite. I have continually maintained scripture teaches both positions through standard hermeneutics. So proof-text hunting one side is not going to convince me of anything.

Also, athletes doubt and struggle all the time. They fear never winning the championship etc. They also have confidence in their abilities. You can have both and they can work together. Reality has shades of gray.

There is clearly a human and divine role to salvation. The human role is accepting that grace and genuinely repenting. I never understood the divine role as God arbitrarily choosing some and condemning others to eternal torment in a game where the outcome is rigged beforehand. The great story and faithfulness of God I see in the OT and in the person of Jesus tells me that God genuinely desires all to be saved. The sinfulness of man is what keeps us from God. Genuine repentance and accepting God is what allows his grace to work. That is what makes the most sense of scripture to me. There is a ton of scripture that supports it. There is a ton of scripture that is against it. Guess what? Scripture is not a theological encyclopedia and it has competing theologies. I use reason and a common sense interpretation of a loving God as exemplified by the incarnation and His faithfulness in the OT to choose which outlook is correct. Because it’s inconceivable to me that anyone could be a Calvinist and not a universalist. No one has to go to hell. If you can explain away all those warnings about falling away in a world where salvation is solely predestined, guess what you can also do with the one’s about hell?

Unless you want to address the totality of scripture, there is little to do but fling verses at one another.

Vinnie

You keep saying this Vinnie, but I don’t know that I, nor Dale, nor any other Calvinist on the forum has actually ever said that it is and this is certainly not how I treat the Bible. I would argue, to borrow a phrase from the Bible Project, that the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. I would also argue that from this story we can infer things about God and his interactions with humanity and the wider creation. If you can find a post where I have said otherwise, please do point it out and I will willingly recant an encyclopaedic view of the Bible.

Which leads me to say, if you truly wish to argue against Calvinism, you may wish to begin by checking what the Calvinists you’re talking to actually believe first. For example, not all Calvinists believe in double predestination. Neither do all who are Confessionally Reformed. Which as I am sure you know are not synonymous terms. Additionally, to say that God is sovereign does not mean that if I punch myself in the head God made me do it. I am still a moral agent who acts and wills and makes choices for which I am responsible. To ignore these is to present egregious strawman depictions of Calvinism. Which in turn imply that the person making the depictions may not know as much about Calvinism as they think they do.

Here’s another example:

Barring the gross oversimplification of predestination, there is very little is this paragraph that I would disagree with (what about you @Dale?), nor many of the Reformed theologians I’ve read and continue to read today. Granted, I can’t speak for the bat-poo crazy nut bar right-wing Calvinists America seems to produce, but from my UK perspective all I’m seeing described is a form of Calvinism that I don’t think actually exists… described with the same old tired troupes I’ve seen since I first joined the Sith Lords (Reformed Theology) over 15 years ago.

Sure Calvinism isn’t perfect, I’ll freely own that, but I find it makes the most sense of the Bible for me. If folk don’t agree, that’s fine, I’ll let them find a model that works for them… I’ll even help them if I can. Because, within reason, I prefer to focus on what unites God’s people than what divides us anyway.

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This Calvinist does not call himself a Calvinist. I avoid it because of the ridiculous oversimplifications and accusations that come from others as we see here. And I don’t know if Calvin would necessarily agree with the adjectival term I precede it with (but we could have an enjoyable discussion ; - ) – I am a “God-is-omnitemporal” Calvinist.

Somehow pretending they don’t exist, the terms that are anathema to Arminians are right there in scripture, and conspicuously. I guess they make like Thomas Jefferson and use a blade to cut out what they don’t like, cognitively at least (which brings the terms cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance to mind): chose and chosen, predestined (the worst offender, but there it is and multiple times), foreknew, draws, appointed to eternal life, set apart, plan and planned, elect, etc. The words are are all time-based and tensed, as is all our language, but they do not actually apply to God, since he is not constrained by time.
 

Clearly. There is a marvelous and delightful (and maybe terrifying) dynamic in which God timelessly orchestrates his providential interventions without infringing upon anyone’s free will, yet we are still responsible for our choices. It would have been better for Judas not to have been born, yet his free will was not violated in God’s appointed plan.

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Now, now, Dale, let’s not return one strawman for another. :slightly_smiling_face: Certainly, that model isn’t perfect either, but some of the most godly, Biblically literate Christians I’ve known have been card-carrying Arminians and would very much not like being compared to Thomas Jefferson.

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I should have said “most Arminians”. :sunglasses:

There is no straw man. If you want to water the term Calvinism down to mean many things that is your business. I go by the simplest definitions of words when talking about a subject, not the obscure beliefs of those still claiming to be Calvinists but rejecting some it’s central tenets. Find a new label is my advice.

Again, I use words according to what they actually mean, not a made up language of what fringe theologians on the internet want or declare them to mean.

Predestination. Noun: 1. (as a doctrine in Christian theology) the divine foreordaining of all that will happen, especially with regard to the salvation of some and not others. It has been particularly associated with the teachings of St. Augustine of Hippo and of Calvin. [oxford languages]

destined, fated, or determined beforehand

From the Latin, make firm beforehand.

“ the doctrine that God in consequence of his foreknowledge of all events infallibly guides those who are destined for salvation”

John Calvin states: “By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.”

You can pretend Calvinism means something else if you want but I am not sure why you are objecting to my comments if you have decided to make up your own definition of Calvinism and they don’t actually apply to you.

I am not interested in semantic word games but I suppose in today’s world, people can identify however they want whether the shoe fits or not. But I’ll continue to use the dictionary and the definition most germane to a word.

Vinnie

That is not predestination in the sense Calvin or I refer to. That is just God intervening and tinkering in the lives of free willed beings.

No one pretends they don’t exist. I have conceded they do. I only asked you to make sense of the totality of scripture because under standard hermeneutics both are found in scripture. The best is when theologians try to harmonize them which is essentially claiming squares and circles are the same shape.

Vinnie

How is it not? And God tinkers?

Was God ‘tinkering’ in Maggie’s life, or Rich Stearns’? His tinkering in Maggie’s was salvific.
 

God’s freedom from the restraints of time does exactly that.

Only if you water the term predestination down to mean something other than what the majority of people understand by the word while simultaneously watering down the meaning all those Biblical verses you are fond of proof-text hunting in support of it.

I’m not sure “God’s freedom from the restraints of time” is intelligible or anything more than a “get out of bad theology jail free card.” It’s very much possible the future can’t be exhaustively known by definition. Ascribing God a “magical quality” which has no ostensive definition or tangible nature is just an apologetical deus ex machina. We have no idea what “freedom from the restraints of time” actually means or entails, or if it’s even a genuine possibility.

And tinker was a poor word choice on my part. Though sometimes it fits considering the resistance and stubbornness of his creation at times!

Vinnie

Rather.

That does not redeem your choice, because we are talking about God and not your stubborn failure to understand.
 

There is nothing watered down about recognizing that God is not restrained by time and that our language is inadequate to describe his being. Tensed.words.do.not.strictly.apply. Predestination would be one of those.
 

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
2 Peter 3:8

You appear to have overlooked it.
 

Peter recognized it.

Sure, Vinnie, whatever helps you sleep at night, mate.

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