But wait, what about the bondage of time? Surely you would not want to put God in such a straitjacket, whereby he is limited by time, unable to travel and act freely outside the limits of temporality? But what sort of limit would that be? Certainly, it makes sense to speak of our time limitations. We work with time constraints, with a writing assignment due Tuesday. We miss our plane because we did not leave the house soon enough. We want to get a project completed, but we worry that in our 91st year, we will not be around to see it through. But none of that is a problem for God. He does whatever he pleases, within the bounds of logic. (He cannot make a square simultaneously a circle or preserve the bachelorhood of a married man. Those are simply contradictions, another kind of nonsense.)
Someone might say, "A personal being cannot exist in a timeless way." Well, why not? What are the conditions sufficient for personhood? Well, it seems to me that the condition which is necessary and sufficient for personhood is self-consciousness. To know oneself as a self, to have self-awareness and self-consciousness and, hence, intentionality and freedom of the will is sufficient for personhood. But self-consciousness is not an inherently temporal notion. God can simply know all truth in a single intuition of truth without having to learn it or having to come by it through a process. As long as His consciousness does not change, there is no reason to ascribe to God temporality. So there is nothing about a self-conscious life that entails temporality as long as it is a changeless self-consciousness.
god everlasting wolterstorff pdf free
A. That's a good question. There are at least two theories, I think, that you could adopt for the basis of divine foreknowledge. One would be that God simply has omniscience as an essential attribute; it is an essential attribute of God to believe only and all true propositions. He doesn't learn anything because He just has the essential property of knowing all truth, and it would be wrong to think that God has to somehow learn what He knows. The other model is called "middle knowledge," which holds that God knows what every free creature would freely do in any circumstances God might place him in. In virtue of knowing those truths and of knowing the decree of His own will to create certain circumstances and place certain creatures in them, God then knows everything that will happen. I'm persuaded that either of those two models is a viable model for divine omniscience and the middle knowledge model is especially useful in explaining God's providence over a world of free creatures.
Nevertheless, what Wolterstorff provides is an enlightening introduction to a Christian aesthetic that breaks free from a purely secular view of the arts, and instead provides us a way to humble the artist as creator in service of the Creator of art.
It is very rare these days to see the problem of evil held up as a knockdown argument for atheism. This is due to the pioneering work of Alvin Plantinga (you guessed it), who has shown that it is impossibly difficult to establish any sound proof of God's non-existence using this argument. He did this by arguing that it is possible that we have been given free will and that God cannot cause us to use our free will 'properly' as then we shouldn't be free. Plantinga further speculated that natural disasters might very well be due to demons misusing their God-given free will.
Here debate has focussed around how to define omnipotence while solving the old chestnuts mentioned above, and also on the question of whether God's omnipotence means that he can make us freely do what he wants, with most philosophers thinking not. There is also debate about whether any realm is outside God's power: does God really create all the truths of mathematics, morals, and logic too? Could he have created them differently?
This is the view that accepts the argument, saying that it is not possible that God know what we shall freely do tomorrow, and so we are not free. God has determined our every move, including the evil ones that we make. This response is typically made by Reformed Calvinists.
This is the view that rejects the argument. This view says that it is possible that God foreknow what we shall freely do tomorrow. Usually those that take this line reject premiss (5): I cannot tomorrow bring it about that God believed something yesterday. They insist that we can bring it about that God believed things in the past. Those that take this line hold on both to God's exhaustive and infallible foreknowledge on the one hand and to human freedom on the other. This view in fact subdivides into two sub-views:
Let us say that tomorrow I shall feel tired and therefore freely stay in bed. Let us further suppose that if I had not felt tired I should freely have decided to get up. On the Molinist view God knows from all eternity the conditional propositional that if I were to feel tired tomorrow I'd freely stay in bed tomorrow and he knows from all eternity also the conditional proposition that if I were not to feel tired tomorrow then I should freely get up tomorrow. Furthermore, God knows that I shall in fact feel tired tomorrow. There is no obvious reason why God should not know this, as this is not a proposition about a future free action. But then God can deduce from the true proposition that I shall feel tired tomorrow and the true proposition that if I were to feel tired tomorrow I'd freely stay in bed tomorrow the true proposition that I shall freely stay in bed tomorrow. So, God can have infallible and exhaustive foreknowledge of the future, including our free future actions, thanks to his knowledge of what we should freely do in certain circumstances.
Knowledge of this sort is called God's 'middle knowledge' because it comes between his knowledge of necessary truths and his free knowledge of what he has freely decided to do. It is also called 'Molinism' after Luis de Molina, who first came up with the view, though there appear to be examples of it in the Bible: 1 Samuel 23:7-13 and Matthew 11:21.
This view holds that God knows our future free actions, but not by middle knowledge. A frequent metaphor used here is that God has a 'time telescope' that enables him to look into far-off times just as a normal telescope helps one to look into far-off places. The idea is that God 'sees' the future just as one might see something happening a distance away; just as my seeing somebody performing an action some distance away doesn't prevent the person from performing it freely, so God's foresight of our actions doesn't prevent them from being performed freely.
This is the view that accepts the argument, but, instead of rejecting human freedom as Calvinistic indeterminists do, it rejects the view that God knows today what we shall freely do tomorrow. This view denies that God has exhaustive and infallible foreknowledge of future free actions. This has recently been the subject of much controversy within the evangelical community. In fact, Paternoster recently published a book, Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, in which Greg Boyd of Bethel College defended the openness view against David Hunt for the simple foreknowledge view, against William Lane Craig for the middle knowledge / Molinist view, and against Paul Helm for the Calvinist / determinist view.
Eternity is also still a 'hot' issue, the question here being whether to understand God's eternity as timelessness, or as everlastingness in time. There are two intervening views: the relative timelessness view, which holds that God exists in his own time, which is different from ours and which cannot be measured by ours, and, secondly, the view that God exists timelessly sans creation and in time when he has created it.
The topic was very important when the logical positivists ruled philosophy because theists were busy trying to find a way of construing religious language that A.J. Ayer would declare meaningful. Now that this threat has been lifted, philosophers of religion feel free to say that they mean what they say (and that they say what they mean).
But within evangelicalism there is a subtle and nuanced move awayfrom this identification of Word of God and Holy Scripture at any level, exceptperhaps in a formal "adoptionist" or "Arian" sense. Whether correct orincorrect, these recent attempts to cut the divine Word of God free from thewritten text of Scripture are conceptually and methodologically reflective ofthe re-entrenchment of dualistic thinking which, in theology, inevitablybifurcates the unity of God's
The problems with Barth's epistemologyarise when he departs from his own biblical standard for understanding thefreedom of God for and among us. This might be described as the influence of an"actualism" with philosophical roots in existentialist philosophy. ... Theentrance of [divine sovereignty and the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit]into the doctrine of revelation is related to Barth's determination toprotect the decisiveness of the ["incarnate action"] chapter of the Story. Onlyhere in Jesus Christ is God free for us. ... [T]he actual addresshappens only when and where He wills it to be so. ... [Thus] no assurance canbe given that the media [e.g., Bible] are always and everywhere bearers of theknowledge of God.[19]
While critical of Barth at points and bringing proper initialcorrective to the particular form of Barth's Christocentric concept ofrevelation, Fackre often falls in step with that very same type ofChristocentricity as the core of his own understanding of the "GrandNarrative." For Fackre, "All that is said in this [Fackre's] work onrevelation is finally traceable to the Word that God spoke to us in thehistorical event of Jesus Christ."[21] This meansthat Christ is rightly regarded as the defining action of God,God's ultimate deed and disclosure, and the "central chapter of the story"which then determines what we see in all other aspects of the story. But italso means that Jesus Christ is finally the one, true, and only Word of God.While emphasizing, much like the later Barth, the freedom of God in promising atrustworthy Presence in all of his reconciling work (and so the narrative),Fackre also insists that Christ is "the one Word" and Scripture, as "witness tothat Word," stands at last outside of what can be truly regarded as divinedisclosure or Word of God. So Fackre's own Christocentricity, no less thanBarth's, reflects a fear that any historical claim to continuity(identity) with the revelatory divine Presence, other than the incarnate Word,imperils that centrality of Christ.[22] Fackreexpresses a significant point for his larger and narrower purposes when heasks, 2ff7e9595c
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