Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [RELIGION] new gnostic gospel discovered

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Rick Buford wrote:
> Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>
> > Mike's specific question seemed rather odd to me, because there was 
> > nothing I had said that implied that it was possible for man to resist 
> > God's will.
> >
> > The point you bring up - doesn't God's will being irrestistable cancel 
> > out the concept of free will - is definitely an interesting question.  
> > I think that I have to answer "no" because otherwise the Bible doesn't 
> > make any sense.  I think that Proverbs 16:9 makes the point well:
> >
> >    In his heart a man plans his course,
> >        but the LORD determines his steps.
>
> While I'm sure, from a Christian perspective, this makes perfectly good 
> sense, I still don't understand how that isn't a contradiction.
>
> Take, for example, a person (well call him X for now), who wants to make 
> the world a better place. X's goal is to make the world a better place 
> by spreading the word of his God to the whole world. Now, taking your 
> Proverbs quote, whether he does this by burning at the stake or feeding 
> and clothing all the non-believers is pre-determined by God.

You have it precisely correct.

> My next argument is one that's been bugging me a long time. The persons 
> that "wrote" the Bible I've been told did so as the Hand of God. i.e., 
> God reached into them, and used them to put words on paper. If God were 
> omnipotent, and free will so important, isn't that yet another 
> contradiction?

This whole issue is rather difficult, and I think that a great many 
Christians feel the same way as you do.  This leads to two dichotomous 
ways of thinking - hyper-Calvinism in which God controls everything, and 
free-will plays no role at all, and Armenianism in which man makes the 
final decisions, and God just creates opportunities for men to make 
decisions.  (In all these debates, the decision that is primarily 
discussed is whether to accept salvation or not.)  This debate is an old 
one, for example it is the whole subject of Martin Luther's book "The 
Bondage of the Will."

However my feeling is that the Bible really does teach both messages 
concurrently, and doesn't even seem to recognise that this is an issue. 
 I am told that in the Hebrew mindset that there is no contradiction 
between God controling everything and man having free will.

Rather than seeing it as an out and out contradiction, I see it as a 
rather difficult paradox which we have yet to fully resolve.  In this 
manner, it is rather similar to the modern theories of general 
relativity and quantum mechanics.  They are both theories that clearly 
have a great deal of truth in them, but as yet physicists have been 
unable to reconcile them in a fully coherent manner.

Stephen

--

Stephen Montgomery-Smith
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen

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