Keep in mind that God isn’t before creation in the sense of a temporal before. He is before in the sense like 1 is before 2 (timelessly). God sees all of reality (past, present, future) from His timeless eternal NOW. There is no time before time. This is self-contradictory. So, yes God is all-glorious in His timeless, eternal, NOW. An example in the Bible of this is the crucifixion. Christ was crucified some 2000 years ago. Yet the Bible says He was slain before the foundation of the world.
Pilgrim,
Thanks buddy. I appreciate your kindness. I will keep what you said in mind.
A lot of people have the misconception that God is egotistical because He seeks praise and worship. What they fail to see is that pride is thinking of yourself more highly than you ought to. For humans to desire the praise and worship of others is egotistical. But we aren’t God. God is the greatest. He is more admirable than anything. We were made to make much of something great. When we do this it completes our joy. The reason God seeks our praise is not because He won’t be complete until He gets it. He does it because we won’t be complete until we give it. This isn’t arrogance on God’s part. It’s love. He doesn’t think more highly of Himself than He ought to. He is the greatest Being in existence. His loving and thinking of Himself is in direct proportion to who He is - the greatest of all Beings. Even Christ said to worship only God when He was tempted by Satan.
Then there is no reason He cannot work in the hearts of ALL people so that ALL people will be complete in joy. Wouldn’t this be the all in all of His glory if every single person He created would give Him due praise?
But you’ve still haven’t answered my question about to whom is He being “prized and admired”.
Well, their finite and limited minds do tend to ignore the other parts of their system when it gets inconvenient, that’s true. But other finite and limited minds are capable of remembering and accounting for the other parts of their system even when it gets inconvenient, so I don’t take that to be a good excuse for “the orthodox reformer” leaving those parts out of the account when it gets inconvenient.
God doesn’t merely allow evil to enter the world, if He creates beings that have the God-given capability to do evil but no capability to do good: they don’t get those capabilities from anywhere other than God, so if God supplies one capability and not the other, God is the one authoritatively ensuring the result: those creatures do injustice and only injustice.
You can ignore that part when it gets inconvenient for you, but don’t expect the rest of us to ignore it. We’re going to remember it.
For example.
For example.
The “never owed” point only applies so far as God has no moral authority above Himself – which is true if supernaturalistic theism (including trinitarian theism) is true, so I don’t dispute that and neither do critics of Calvinism generally. You can keep repeating it all you want but it doesn’t answer the actual criticism.
The “never owed” point doesn’t apply so far as God, as the ground of all reality including His own forever-ongoing self-existence, is an interpersonal union of fair-togetherness (righteousness, justice) between Persons, self-Begetting, self-Begotten, self-Giving. To refuse to act toward bringing unrighteous creatures to righteousness would be the same as acting against God’s own fundamental righteousness of existence. A unitarian or modalist could get away with proposing that; a trinitarian theist cannot. You might not care about that (nor some of the other members here), but any “orthodox reformer” ought to care about it, and I dang sure care about it as an orthodox trinitarian Christian.
I might (in theory) be argued out of accepting ortho-trin, but unless that happens I’m not going to accept any proposal that voids ortho-trin, even if a nominal ortho-trin proponent accidentally proposes it. This is a vast and pernicious misunderstanding endemic among Calvinists especially (though also among some Arminians along a different line such as God choosing to give up saving sinners from sin even though He could if He just kept at it), and it would behoove you to buckle down and do the logical pushups (maybe for several years) before going along with the party line on this topic.
Back to examples of you, or whatever source you’re copy-pasting without paying attention, leaving out the most relevant detail.
Ditto.
Obviously God is X in acting against the not-X with His X; but on this system they only can do not-X and not X by God’s own authoritative choice for not-X.
See, when you forget (or your source forgets) to keep it all in account, it looks like it’s their fault they’re in hell and that they could have escaped going to hell if only they had repented. But they couldn’t have repented before hell anymore than after hell: God authoritatively chose to make sure they never had the slightest possibility of doing anything other than injustice – they never had redeeming grace before hell either, on the system you’ve decided to hold to this month.
You used to realize and agree with all this, too – unless you were only saying you did to get attention. You aren’t even arguing against it now, you’re just ignoring the details.
:
Edwards was neglecting to include some very important points there; but you ought to keep them in mind. Whether he was keeping them in mind himself and just not saying them for whatever reason, only God knows (and perhaps Jonathan Edwards at the time).
Dondi was in fact keeping that in mind. That was his criticism: God doesn’t need evil for His glory to be perfect, God’s glory is perfect even had He never created at all.
If God is all-glorious in His timeless, eternal NOW, He doesn’t need the ultimate injustice, much less to authoritatively bring ultimate and final injustice about, for His glory to be complete.
On the contrary, His glory and justice can only be complete by bringing any who become unjust by the abuse of God’s grace to be just instead.
Nope. Pride is acting against fair-togetherness with other people in order to promote one’s self at their expense.
You should probably study metaphysics for a few decades before lecturing on metaphysics and other people’s misconceptions and what other people (supposedly) fail to see.
Still, hey, on the system you have chosen to promote this month, God couldn’t possibly be egotistical, because He obviously doesn’t seek the praise and worship of rational creatures WHOM HE WILL NEVER GIVE THE ABILITY TO DO THAT!! – but rather to whom He will only ever give the ability to rebel against Him instead, and maybe praise perhaps with false and unrighteous praise. Calvs are a bit split on whether God seeks unrighteous praise (and so brings that about) or not.
Except if the system you’re promoting this month is true, where even one rational creature (and much moreso than one) was explicitly made NOT to make much of something great – BY GOD’S AUTHORITATIVE CHOICE.
Just look at all that love which God gives to creatures to whom He gives no possibility of doing justice and so must always be stock targets of God’s hatred and punishment!
But then (on this system) created Satan to first worship only God and then to never again worship God. Or to never worship God at all in the first place.
True; but… look, I’ve got to say it, so just consider this as an in-house criticism (only applicable to fellow ortho-trins): a ton of trinitarian theists aren’t remotely consistent about what constitutes God’s eternal intrinsic glory. Leading to nonsense (within a trinitarian theology) like God ceasing to act to bring unjust people to do justice, or even acting so that they never have any possibility of choosing to do justice.
And then when that becomes an obvious problem, they try to get around it by selectively forgetting that God acts to bring creatures into existence and to keep them in existence, with capability sets according to His choice; so then they’ll say that God doesn’t choose for those who can only do evil to only ever do evil, it just kinda happens as though He doesn’t after all have final authoritative say in what capabilities they do now or will ever have.
Or they’ll punt to incomprehensibility, which they’ll never bother to allow in the case of logical or factual problems they see in other people’s attempts of course. But which more importantly negates how people self-critically check for making mistakes.
Feh.
I don’t blame Cole for this – he can’t keep a theology more than 40 days, much less could he be expected to keep its precepts consistently and coherently in mind. He’s just copying from sermons and books somewhere; he doesn’t know any better. (Though by God he’s going to lecture us on it anyway! – how could he get more attention here if he doesn’t?)
But I do blame those people. They had experience and aptitude and training; they should have known better. An engineer might not mean to screw up his math, but when he does he’s the one responsibly at fault. Not criminally at fault if it was an accident, of course, but it isn’t the fault of the people driving their cars.
Okay, I’m sorry, that was harsher than I originally meant to be when starting the paragraph.
It’s just, a few weeks ago you were cheerfully rejecting Calvinism (per se) on just this point among others, Cole. All you’ve done is flip-flopped over without even keeping in mind what you previously agreed to; and you aren’t addressing the actual issues at stake here, you’re talking around them (or you’re copy-pasting from other people and they’re talking around them but you either don’t see or don’t care that they are).
It’s like you’re starting over from scratch (with a brand new name of Infinite Glory, by the way, which you didn’t let anyone know you were using until we let you know we obviously knew it was you – after which you asked the ad/mods to delete the thread, and then you started this one on exactly the same topic, pretty much copy-pasting it) without the slightest idea of what anyone here has ever been saying on the topics you’re trying to instruct us on (including back only a few days ago when you tried to post this topic as “Infinite Glory”) – topics with positions you yourself rejected only weeks ago – as though we’re the ones who are ignorant of what ‘real’ Calvs teach. We’ve been through it many times already. Including back a few days ago when you tried to post it with a new pseudonym. If you’re going to talk about it, pick up where the years-long discussion is at.
And don’t try to talk like an expert on it. That’s pointless coming from a new convert to a position. When you’ve lived and worked as a Calv theologian for ten years (or 10 thousand days or whatever), and have experience working on all angles of the issues raised and addressed by specifically Calv theology, THEN you can get away with that. Otherwise have the decency to quote who you’re lifting from (like the Edwards quote, that was good, or Sproul or whoever.)
Also, we know the color-jargon and the rhetorical turns of phrase. In some cases we’re painfully familiar with it: the bloodier the sword the keener the justice! etc. We aren’t going to be impressed by it if we already know what it means in the context of the system implications, or what it’s covering up (more usually); and just about always we can deploy it on our side just as easily (unless we think it’s a nonsense phrase which we wouldn’t use because we don’t want to talk nonsense). Technical terms and phrases are fine of course; poetic flourishes to make a position we think is faulty (or even rancid) sound better, don’t work. You aren’t preaching to the choir. Maybe you’re preaching to yourself and think giving it a pretty sheen will make it work or sound or taste better – but we don’t.
…sigh. Crap, I’m usually the friendliest opponent to Calvinism here. I’d have a lot more patience with some wandering Calv who showed up, even if he had only been a Christian for like 3 years (much less a Calv for three days) and was all eager to start instructing the benighted non-Calvs with it. I should probably just go do something else, or focus on what I agree with you. Calvs and I actually agree on a ton of things.
(But then, this thread was set up specifically to draw criticism attention about our supposed inexperienced or inept misunderstandings, not to talk about what we already agree on.)
You were a bit harsh, Jason – gotta agree with you there. I know you care for Cole, and it’s right you should apologize to him. After all, it’s one thing to attack the doctrine and quite another to use harshly the one deceived by it. I know he sounds pedantic, but I wonder if that’s not just the way he writes – it’s hard communicating by the written word only. He just gets excited about these Calvinist books he’s been (alas) reading. I agree that these guys are swaying him (as they do so many others) by their wise-sounding arguments “all fire and fury, signifying nothing” (to misquote Shakespeare), and it’s a shame what they do to sensitive individuals.
On the bright side, Cole tells me he’s just received Jan Bonda’s One Purpose of God, so it’ll be interesting to see what he makes of it. I’d really just love to rip up all the lies (tares?) that pop up everywhere and sap the nourishment and moisture that ought to go to the wheat. God’s children need good wheat to eat that will make them strong, not tares to cause them delusions and sickness and death. I ache for the day that the sons of the evil one (he is the father of lies) are gathered together and thrown into the fire, and the wheat brought to the barn. Maranantha for sure.
But other finite and limited minds are capable of remembering and accounting for the other parts of their system even when it gets inconvenient, so I don’t take that to be a good excuse for “the orthodox reformer” leaving those parts out of the account when it gets inconvenient.
Calvs and I actually agree on a ton of things.