calvin's doctrine of predestination- c/d ?

I like the idea of random cosmic harshness.

(There actually are a slew of strips where Calvin discusses ideas of predestination, but Watterson being the sharp fellow he is, the word itself is never used.)

Currently my outrage is being monopolized by U.S. foreign policy, so I don't have the energy to go off about Calvinism.

Based on the Bible reading I've done, I think Calvin's doctrine of election is more justified by scripture than theological doctrines which teach that people can freely choose to have faith in Christ (or not); but I still think there are inconsistencies in the Bible's treatment of the issue. When you get into the broader issue of predestination in general, I'm less sure about which side I think the Bible comes out on. I think predestination probably has the lead, but there are a lot of passages which seem to imply that events are open ended and more than one outcome is possible. (Currently, some evangelicals with Reformed theological attitudes toward scriptural authority and inerrancy, are making a spirited defense of the view that God does not predestine everything, and that it's possible for him to change. Phrase to look for: "The Openness of God.")

(I have bugger all knowledge of the theological aspects of Calvinism and its amiguities if there are any, so feel free to sweep this post aside if necessary)

Sort of have to figure the author of Job wasn't much down with predestination, though, or that Satan didn't know about it -- cause who makes wagers with the guy who already knows how everything turns out?

(Using Job to prove or disprove a theological point is cheap, though, as much as using Revelation is; it just doesn't play well with the others.)

A. Nairn, Calvinists quite clearly emphasize that it is nor merely a matter of foreknowledge, but of God's active predestining (word?) things.

Tep, how can you say it isn't really addressed? True, there are large sections of the Bible which don't really come anywhere near systematic theological thinking--but Paul's letters are full of explicit claims about God's having chose the elect ahead of time.

But assuming God is soverign (over all things), then foreknowledge and predestining would be the same.

Maybe realising that predestination means you can sin away and generally be useless = eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

doesn't really work that way. a "saved" person would never do those things. if you sinned, this was taken as evidence that you were not saved, and therefore in a weird way it encourages people to be good because only god knows their fate.

predestination is then in my opinion just a honest philosophical response to the problem of an omniscient god and free will.

I would call sin more of a state and not so much an individually action, and say that all people (even saved people) are sinners.

The problem is that not even Paul presents a systematic, explicit model of predestination akin to Calvin's -- and in the ancient Jewish world, predestination and free will were not considered incompatible, nor was either deeply thought out. (Theologies that pay painstaking attention to detail and nail down the specifics of everything are a Catholic/Western European thing, because that's where you have hundreds of years of orthodoxy struggling against heterodoxy; you don't find it in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and you don't find it in Second Temple Judaism). They were almost more like figures of speech.

I agree with you there. If God is really the first cause and the creator of everything, and if he is omniscient (including foreknowledge), then the act of creation is also, in a sense an act of predestining everything that is now going to happen.

But wait, I think I remember what the Calvinist point was. If God simply looks into the future and knows in advance who is going to accept the message of the gospel, but individuals actually are able to choose to accept or reject that message; then God's sovereignty is limited. God doesn't just foresee that certain individuals will choose to be saved. According to Calvinism, without God's direct intervention, they would not be free choose to be saved (or to do any other good thing).

The whole issue of time and omnipotence is tricky, and tends to get bogged down in paradox. It's fun, but if I were making a serious offensive on Calvinism, I wouldn't deal with predestination in general, but rather focus on the belief that human beings are born with a wicked nature and are unable (and unwilling, and unable to be willing) to do anything about it, unless God chooses to save them.

The Westminster Confession states: "Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions; yet hath He not decreed any thing because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions." Dodgy Internet Source

I think this was in responses to others (Arminius or some Arminians?) who claimed that God chose his elect based upon his foreknowledge of who would accept the offer of salvation.

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x-post with Tep: Hmmm. I'll have to think about that. I might be a little too stuck in seeing things from the Reformed point of view that I temporarily embraced while I still considered myself a believer. (I don't really think Calvinism makes perfect consistent sense of the Bible. I think it's inconsistent. But I think that if you started off with pretty conservative assumptions about biblical revelation, authority, inerrancy, and then tried to make something logically consistent out of the Bible, Calvinism does the job better than any other theological system I've seen.)

Theologies that pay painstaking attention to detail and nail down the specifics of everything are a Catholic/Western European thing, because that's where you have hundreds of years of orthodoxy struggling against heterodoxy; you don't find it in the Eastern Orthodox Church

Out of curiosity, is that true in the Eastern Orthodox Church even now?

See, it's like what I've tried to tell fundamentalists about the impossibility of reading the Bible "literally": you're bringing stuff in with you from the start, if you're making assumptions about revelation and inerrancy, so that what you get from the Bible isn't purely from the Bible. (That's not different from any other system, I just think predestination is one of those things where you can find things in there to support it or send it away, depending on how you lean and how you read.)

The Eastern Orthodox Church now: from what I understand, they never developed the complicated theologies the Catholic Church did, simply because in many cases they weren't forced to. The Catholic conception of the Trinity is pretty much the result of several centuries of defining Catholicism in opposition to heresy; the Trinity had to be That Which Isn't X, Y, Z, A, B, or Q. The Orthodox Church just didn't go through that (the monophysite thing came up a lot, but that's just one thing): classically, Orthodox clergy consider that Catholic theologians overcomplicate things and are too concerned with nit-picking details of little significance (this is usually a thing of amusement or at the most exasperation, though, not something to be condemned). That's probably largely true today.

You want to do good things to prove to yourself and others that you're being saved.