"I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:4).Well, okay, but what about Human Free Will?
The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord" (Prov 16:1).Well, what about "random" stuff?
The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps (Prov 16:9).
Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand (Prov 19:21).
A man's steps are from the Lord; how then can man understand his way? (Prov 20:24).
The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will (Prov 21:1).
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord (Prov 16:33).Okay, how about natural events?
"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father" (Matt 10:29).What about life and death?
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that" (James 4:13-15)It seems to me that God's Sovereignty includes ... everything. We have "been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will" (Eph 1:11).
But, hey, that's just me. You'll have to figure out what to do with God's Word on your own.
17 comments:
It seems that a child at a very young age never really ponders the sovereignty of his/her parents. it just not an issue. there is the natural submission that comes with being a child.
now when we become teens, well that it another thing. we constantly challenge our parents authority. well what has this to do with God's sovereignty? well when i was older and wiser, i used to challenge God, and claim my independence. but now that i am child, His sovereignty gives me great comfort.
Are we not the generation that was raised on the advice to "Question authority"?
Well, I for one am glad that you recognize that scripture is not sovereign. Now if you can just acknowledge that God is living, too, we can be on our way to loving God's creation today rather than judging and killing it.
I don't suppose I understood a thing you just said, Feodor. "Scripture is not sovereign"? I did use Scripture to show that God is Sovereign. I do believe that the Bible is God-breathed, that it carries the authority of God as His Word. "Just acknowledge that God is living." Completely lost. God is living. I wouldn't even think of worshiping a non-living deity. (A contradiction in terms.) I'm sure you meant something in what you said; I just don't have a clue what it is.
You and I claim God is sovereign, too. That doesn’t make us sovereign like God is. Scripture is in the same position. And, as we agreed, Christ’s incarnation divinizes human personhood such that we can participate in divine life. So our testimony serves as the Word, too, especially when speak together as the church, the body of Christ.
“... the righteousness that comes from faith speaks like this: ... The message is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.”
Dan complains that I conflate my opinion into God's words. You seem like you embrace the thought.
Did I miss that agreement about Christ "divinizing" human personhood? What do you mean by that? Are we, as Christians, little gods? Are we somehow raised to being divine? What does it mean to be divine, to you?
As a Protestant, I believe that Scripture is the sole source for life and practice of a Christian. If a testimony disagrees with Scripture, then said testimony holds no weight because God doesn't contradict Himself. Because I believe that the Bible is God's revelation of Himself, maintained through the work of His Spirit, I tend to stand on Scripture being Sovereign because it is the words and works of the Sovereign. We may fail to perfectly understand it all the time, but that is because, no matter how long we live under Him, we still live bound by our struggle with the Flesh, and the Flesh cannot understand things of the Spirit.
The trick is that not any one individual can be trusted with the task. Paul is speaking to the Roman church as the church: as a deliberative body of the faithful seeking the guidance of the Spirit in the practice of corporate worship and communal love. Like any communal practice of deliberation, various folks have recognized gifts to be as diligent in decision making as possible: wise heads; group leaders; consensus builders; critical reviewers; those that pay attention to the marginalized.
Of course, none of these roles have any gender requirements.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. I don't think it's the opinion you will find in the Bible, but I also don't think that you limit yourself to what is found in the Bible, so that doesn't much matter to you. That puts us on uneven footing, of course. On one hand, you have a much broader area in which to play, so to speak, while I'm limited to Scripture as the final authority in matters of faith and practice. On the other hand, you have much less solid footing since it is a constantly changing field in which you are playing and very little can be ultimately relied upon, so I guess there are trade offs, eh?
I’m with David. Where was the agreement about “divinizing”, that whole concept sounds a bit like the LDS concept that we are able to become gods.
Since I was supposedly part of this "agreement," I suppose it is significant that I don't know where it is, either. I certainly don't agree that Christ's Incarnation makes humans divine.
But, I saw it written right in the thread that you agreed. Must be true, I saw it on the internet.
In Stan's earlier post we had a brief discussion where the western Christian notion of sanctification and the eastern Christian notion of deification, which I've here called divination are fundamentally the same thing. The difference is that eastern Christian theology takes "we can participate in the divine nature" of 2 Peter quite literally. This is vociferously opposed Calvinist traditions, mostly opposed by other Protestant traditions, somewhat in Catholicism despite ways in which Aquinas agrees about the capacity of human intellection.
Here are some snippets were Stan seems to see sanctification as divination, but perhaps not in the corporeal joys of human reality:
Stan: So we have this promise that God has plans for good for us. Same promise as the Jeremiah promise to the exiles in Babylon ... only better. It's better because their promise was just to get back home but ours is "all things".... That's God's purpose. That we would be conformed to the image of His Son. That we would call upon Him and pray. That we would be connected to Him as His children, His adopted.... It kind of makes "health and wealth" pale in comparison. "In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation" (2 Cor 5:19). God's plan is reconciliation with Him. There is no better "welfare," no better promise for a future and a hope. I think the Jeremiah promise remains for us. We just need to avoid expecting a pitiful human notion of a pay off instead of the rich one God intends....
Feodor: Christ's incarnation was the divine act of taking flesh so we of flesh can take on divinity. This short sentence sums up the 1700 year long eastern theology of Christianity which also influences some groups of western faith.... from 2 Peter 1: "His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature.
Stan: I simply meant that God's plans for our good are not merely emotional or comfortable or certainly not physical -- not simply earthly. I meant that His plans for our good transcend the current, actually trivial version of "good". We are being conformed to His image daily, constantly, continually. As I indicated, it's part of that "all things" that "work together for good." In the lingo, it's "sanctification."
Feodor: The incarnation frees us to do all things we can do divinely
Stan: Except sin, of course. I'm sure you meant that. But you included "rap music," so ... I'm kidding, of course (about the rap music thing).
Seems to be agreement so far.
David, it is a tautology to say that scripture is God's literal word and, since God does not contradict himself, everything in scripture must be facts.
I agree that God cannot contain contraction. But no language, no written language, no spoken language, no leather bound one volume or million volume work can contain God. It must necessarily fail. This goes double for a translation of a text that we don't have the original of. Nonetheless, papyrus and ink cannot contain God.
And scripture, using human language, even literarily presents a God who changed his mind as a way to deal with its own shortcomings at comprehending the changes of history but the idea of a constant God.
God tells Noah that the rainbow is a sign to remind God that he has promised never again to treat misbehavior with flood.
"I am going to make a solemn promise to you and to everyone who will live after you. This includes the birds and the animals that came out of the boat. I promise every living creature that the earth and those living on it will never again be destroyed by a flood. The rainbow that I have put in the sky will be my sign to you and to every living creature on earth. It will remind you that I will keep this promise forever. When I send clouds over the earth, and a rainbow appears in the sky, I will remember my promise to you and to all other living creatures. Never again will I let floodwaters destroy all life. When I see the rainbow in the sky, I will always remember the promise that I have made to every living creature. The rainbow will be the sign of that solemn promise."
Well, no one now supposes the kind of God that forgets things.
Also, Paul, allegorizes Galations 4 and Roman in order to reinterpret the Mosaic promise and the situation of the Jews vis a vis salvation. He reintrerprets and reverses passages from Genesis and Exodus, Isaiah and Malachi. He again allegorizes from Genesis and the Abrahamic promise in Galations 3 in order to change the idea of faith and works.
He does this because he believes that Jesus himself, as Jesus claimed, fulfilled the law and changed the terms that God had established in the Bible (which, for Paul, is the Hebrew Scriptures, our OT).
David (and Craig) and Stan, a cheap and easy reference to begin to understand the use of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinization_(Christian)
Feodor,
Understand that your view of Scripture doesn't coincide with mine (or David's or ...). Scripture itself views itself as the Word of God. If it is not, you're certainly free to believe what you want ... except, of course, the Bible. You choose to believe that God changes His mind and you choose to say that God promises "never again to treat misbehavior with flood" (even though the text you included said specifically that He promised that the earth and every living thing on it would never be destroyed, not that nothing would), but I don't see it. So you're free to proceed with your views, obviously, but if you wish to inform mine, you'll need to do it with God's Word rather than in spite of it.
Christianity doesn't allow for divinization in the sense of becoming God. The biblical (and early Church fathers) use of "god" (lowercase) refers to mighty men, not the divine. (It's the same complaint the Jehovah's Witnesses have when they translate John 1:1 to say that Jesus was "a god," not "God.") Christianity is a monotheistic religion and once the theology moves to "divinization," it ceases to be monotheistic and, therefore, Christian ... no matter what name they applies to themselves. We can "partake" which means "to experience" and we can be "adopted" which means to be in the family of God without being of the same nature, but Christianity doesn't allow for divinization of believers. If the theology denies, "The Lord your God is one," it is not Christian.
Stan, I understand very well the Reformation tradition in which you read Scripture. I understand the tradition's gifts and handicaps. I grew up in an agrarian protestant tradition and made my spiritual sojourn into sacramentally centered traditions that understand that it is more than scripture that makes God's presence real. The word, wine, bread, water, oil, fish, the element's of the ancient world that communicate God's presence, grace, and embrace as scripture encodes them point to the wider world's witness to the Creator. Nard, too, honored Jesus. It was the 16th and 17th century that threw out so much of the panoply of Christian interaction with sacred carvings in stone, wood, embroidered fabric, incense, and hammered metal.
The word is not alone. That's not what Luther meant. All he meant was that Scripture was sufficient. Then he went about proving that so much else is a bounty of God's gifts, getting married chief among them. Calvin stripped so much away and then spend sermon after sermon in an anxiety about how to comfort the Elect because nothing in the world was allowed to communicate God's lovingkindness any more. Sunsets were to be damned.
You say "Scripture itself views itself as the Word of God." I have not idea, then, how you read Paul - as he is writing our sriptures! - tell us that the word is very near us, in our mouth, on our hearts.
You say "Christianity doesn't allow for divinization in the sense of becoming God" but I never said we become God. All I can say is what Scripture says: we can participate in the divine nature. What a thing to believe! But you seem to say that kind of thing is put off until the hereafter and nothing on earth is related to such a thing? Correct me if I am wrong.
That is not what scripture says. You, Stan, can participate in the divine nature. If you cannot accept that, then you are not looking to where scripture bears witness: not itself, but to the living Christ. Doesn't should like you believe in the living Christ. Or maybe it's just hard for you to trust some parts of scripture.
"I can do all things through Christ."
Again, you snooze you lose is my advice.
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