Another interesting book is Mullins “End of the Timeless God”
So how does his knowledge of the past affect the present? The past still has to be orchestrated.
Everyone you’ve referenced is saying timeless. He is timefull, omnipresent in spacetime ‘slices’.
Why does the past need to be meticulously orchestrated beyond God setting down fundamental laws and frameworks of how nature operates, and letting things play out. E.g., God gives other agents in the universe free will with a real capacity to determine future events, with God (of course) free at any time to intervene and react as he sees fit.
I think its semantics re spacetime “slices”–either God experiences a sequence of events timefully, or he does not, whatever one calls it.
Since everyone is doing their own thing, providence is accidental.
No, God has full control over his own actions (providence) and knows what he would do, given every conceivable future possibility. And knowing every future possibility, he is not taken by surprise by anything that may or may not happen . He is the master Chess Player who has a perfect plan to react to all possible scenarios, and to work it together for his good end…
Oh I know some people talk about spacetime slices. I just can’t logically see how they really resolve the age-old debate of freewill/ determinism/ and time, despite that fancy term. Chalk it up to my own intellectual limitations if you will, but meh-- to me a God in time is the only way I can logically make sense of a relational being committed to reacting to his creation in love/ freewill.
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I can see how a cause and effect lens can cause us to see grace operating by the same rules of cause and effect. It could argued conversely that grace is a denial of the principle of cause and effect since receiving God’s grace is not based on anything that we did necessarily.
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We know he is inscrutable and beyond fathoming, so I do not insist on my mind being able to ‘logically make sense’ of the how he does it, but I certainly do know that he does it and it is wonder full.
Think of a Perpetrator who has a very recognizable M.O. We as forensic examiners see the evidence and recognize the M.O. but do not understand how it was accomplished. The objective facts are still there and the cause and effect obvious, but the how in between them is still a mystery.
Some of us are more affected than others. 
(Maybe I’m one of them. ; - )
Autofill and autocorrect are my worst enemas.
Although we all must admit that we can never fathom God perfectly, I think theologians study and work on the basis that God has given us minds and intellectual abilities that make an effort to understand God fruitful (or else what would be point of theology? ). Just like scientists, we may never understand the natural world perfectly, but we undertake the work of science because we presume it gives us some true and useful insights. If we all threw up our hands and just said “its all a mystery impossible to comprehend” then what’s the point of thinking about evidence of anything at all?
So, if presented with rival pictures of God-- “models”, I’m going to choose the one that makes more logical sense to me–the one that coheres best with the way I see God interacting with people in history–through Jesus, and elsewhere recorded in scripture.
But I hold such models with humility…knowing that this isn’t a doctrine or piece of knowledge critical to one’s faith, and that getting one’s head around God and the metaphysics of time is a very complex field indeed.
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Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed.
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I think that both of those (whether sincerely held or misunderstood by those outside of Calvinism) come from a more modern misunderstanding of the phrase “Total Depravity”, at least partly stemming from shifts in word meaning over the last 350 years. As far as I can tell, the word has shifted from meaning “in all aspects” or “in all components” to “in every way” or “in completion”. The Westminster Confession explicitly states that the unregenerate can do good works because of common grace, but that such works are not sufficient for salvation.
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We cannot earn salvation, so this is irrelevant. Nothing anyone does earns salvation
Salvation means there is judgment.
If God had forgiven all sins then there is no judgement, therefore there is no need for salvation.
Did Jesus die to forgive all sins or not?
God’s grace means that there is forgiveness not judgement.
Richard
For clarity, it might be best to say that “the gears are the proximate cause of the ticking, but we are the ultimate observable (whether there is an unobservable agent causing the person to do it is a separate issue) cause of the ticking” or something to that effect, as there is a causality chain involved.
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Yes, that’s the point of the final clause there.
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However the Westminster confession still lays the burden of sin on the whole of humanity by default.
Richard