From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Fri Apr 25 2003 - 03:20:27 EDT
Burgy wrote:
> I think God
> does NOT see the future -- at least not in detail -- but can and often is
> surprised by what we, his created yet partially autonomous beings, choose
> as courses of action in certain circumstances.
I like this as part of a plank of a theological platform. For one thing, if God could
see the future in detail, why wouldn't he have inspired his prophets to make
some of their messianic prophecies a bit clearer? Why do some of Jesus'
prophecies seem not quite on target? And why is the Revelation
not interpretable in any detail?
There are two related principles I insist on, however:
1) God is strongly goal-oriented and knows in fair detail what he wants his
final outcome to be. History has a purpose and is headed
towards some fulfillment.
2) God has superb intuition about how to achieve his goals, and he has the
ability to implement his intuitions.
Any view of God that makes him something like a humongous supercomputer does
not resonate with me at all. To me God is a person with an extraordinarily good feel
for even the finest details of the world who works to influence it mostly by
seat-of-the-pants intuition (if you can imagine seats of spiritual pants).
All this stuff about God seeing past and future simultaneously, that he's
omni-this and omni-that, is mostly pure philosophy sometimes justified by
misusing devotional sentiments expressed in the Psalms, etc. Jim Armstrong
in another post has done a good job of challenging these platitudes. We
should all be aware by now of how little philosophy by itself has been able
to deduce about the real world. Theology likewise has no basis except to
the degree that it derives from actual experience of God.
On the basis of such experience I believe there's justification for
saying God, like all spiritual persons, exists in some sense outside
space-time; but what the ramifications might be I have no idea. I
don't believe that it means he sees all time at once.
Don
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Apr 25 2003 - 03:17:15 EDT