Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: garyf@mehlville.ncsa.uiuc.edu (Gary Faulkner) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Random thoughts on free will, etc. Message-ID: Date: 17 Dec 89 06:56:17 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: NCSA - Univerisity of Illinois @ Urbana/Champaign Lines: 213 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I really don't intend on starting a long arguement, but I wonder if some of this could be clarified (it is a response by the moderator to an article. > ... I am a > supra-lapsarian, which means that I believe God intended the Fall. First, this is the first time I have ever heard the term "supra-lapsarian." What is the source for the word (specific word origins if possible), and how does it relate to a belief in the intention by God of the Fall of man? Second, I have seen (and enjoyed) the thinking and biblical support which you typically use in your responses and comments on s.r.c articles. I don't see the biblical support for this one. > (Actually, I believe in evolution, so I don't believe that the Fall is > to be located in a single pair of humans, but that has no real impact > on these discussions.) Thus I would have to say that God is in some > sense responsible for sin. His plan is that all would sin so that he > can show mercy to all (ca. Rom 11:32 -- sorry for not being more > precise, but I don't have a Bible here). ... Ok, I looked up Rom 11:32. I can see how a loose interpretation would support PART of a position such as is described, but I'd be more interested in a contextual supporting passage, especially in the OT. > ... However the statement that > his plan involved all in sin is misleading unless the other half is > taken into account: that this state is the first stage in God's plan, > which also includes redemption from sin. ... --clh] I would also like to see support for this position as well. I am not stating that your beliefs are wrong. More, I'd like to understand them, understand where (and more important why) they differ from mine, and what lead you to them. If this is better handled off-line, feel free to use email directly (I realize that to some people their beliefs are a very personal thing). Gary Faulkner National Center for Supercomputing Applications - University of Illinois Internet: garyf@mehlville.ncsa.uiuc.edu Disclaimer: I've only stated my opinion, not anyone elses. ---------- From: hedrick@cs.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Actually, I should have done that response as a separate posting rather than a moderatorial comment, though I doubt that it makes much difference except to those with an illusion that the moderator is unbiased. Anyway, supra-lapsarian is one of a zillion technical terms used to separate various varieties of Calvinism. Calvinism tended to fragment, because many Christians are uncomfortable with predestination in its full glory. Supra-lapsarian refers to the question of whether God was responsible for the Fall. (Lapsarian is from the Latin that is behind "lapse".) The Supra-lapsarian position says that God intends everything that happens, even the Fall. The infra-lapsarian position says that humans are responsible for the Fall. Presumably it didn't exactly catch God by surprise, but it wasn't something he specifically intended. In response to it, God has chosen to save some people, but not others. This seems to some to present less of a challenge to God's love and/or his justice than the image of a God who intended the introduction of sin into human life. My own view is that it's a mistake to try compromises like this. The whole point of predestination, at least for me, is that it allows us to think of life as a gift from God. He is responsible for everything that happens to us, and does not just scurry around figuring out how to recover from what people do. To exempt the existence of sin from his plan seems to me to leave us straining out gnats and swallowing camels. The point I was trying to make is that I think we need to see predestination as being something done by God for our benefit. It is not entirely clear to me how far Paul intended to go in Romans. It is very tempting to read Rom 11:32 as saying that God will save everyone. But that may not be what he means. "all" may be limited. However what I think is clear from Rom. is that to the extent that something like predestination is true, it should only be seen as part of God's redemptive plan. In Rom 9, Paul talks about the fact that not all are being saved, indicates that this is part of God's plan, and defends God as having every right to make pots for different purposes. Taken alone, this sounds like God has arbitrarily decided to damn part of his people. However in Rom 11, we see that God's hardening is temporary. It is done for the purpose of saving the Gentiles. Once that has happened, God will save those who he had previously hardened. I have some serious questions about how widely Paul means some of the comments in Rom 11 to apply. Does 11:26 really mean that every Jew, no matter when he lived, will be saved? I don't know. However I think it is clear at least that God's hardening was temporary, and will be replaced with a desire to save. I do not see anything in Rom. to suggest that God has a secret plan to damn anyone. I would say what I take from Rom is (1) to the extent that God hardens anyone, he does it as part of a plan that is ultimately intended for salvation (2) that he intends the existence of sin in the world to act as an opportunity for his mercy. How you work these ideas into a systematic theological position is less clear to me. The simplest approach is to say that God intends to save everyone, but that for some reason rather than simply creating us all as perfect beings, he chose to have us start out as sinners and then save us from that. The primary problem with this is the implication that everyone is saved. In other letters, Paul (not to mention the rest of the Bible) certainly seems to say that many people reject God's gift and end up being condemned for doing so. I'll comment a bit more on this below. I'm willing to talk about the implication that all are saved. However I think that sin being part of God's plan is part of the essential message of Rom., and I don't see any way to get rid of that without ejecting Rom. from the NT. Before talking a bit more about universal salvation, let's look at what one might get by taking Rom. seriously, but still accepting a fairly traditional concept of judgement. The Christian tradition generally has tried to do justice both to the concept of God having ultimate control and to human responsibility. So it is by no means novel to suggest that God has an intention for how things should go, but that he allows people to reject it. One interesting way to deal with Rom. would be the following: The Fall and the existence of sin are part of God's plan. He intends for us to be first prisoners of disobedience, so that he can show mercy to us all. We have no choice about the first part. But we can reject the second. The result of this would be a position that I've never heard of before: supra-lapsarian Arminianism. (Arminianism is yet another offshoot of Calvinism. It tones down predestination in order to allow for "free will". It is probably the position typically taken by those who believe that our salvation is entirely a gift from God, but one that we can turn down.) I have toyed with going further than this, and saying that everyone is eventually saved. This allows us to take Rom 11 at face value. However such an option is open to us only if we are willing to take a rather "liberal" view of Scripture. I am certainly not a believer in inerrancy, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go quite as far as this view would require. Let's look at what is involved. First, it's pretty obvious that there is no single, precise account in the Bible of the final judgement. In the earlier strata of the OT (e.g. Ps. 6:5) we seem to have a view much like the early Greek view. In Sheol existence is rather shadowy: no one praises God there. There's no sign of judgement. By NT times, the concept of judgement with eternal reward and punishment had entered Judaism (perhaps from the Persians). Jesus' view varies from a rather conventional last judgement (e.g. Lk 16:20, with the rich man in Hades in torment), to annihilationism (Luke 14:14 talks about the resurrection of the just, and 16:20 of those worthy to be resurrected. This implies -- at least to me -- that those who are not worthy simply stay dead). Generally he simply refers to Gehenna. As someone commented in a recent posting, Gehenna was at that time being used as a garbage dump. However the term had implications of eschatological judgement in 1st Cent. Jewish writings. But certainly the reference is far more ambiguous as to what Jesus was actually thinking of than the English "hell". Outside of Rom, Paul certainly seems to think of a fairly conventional judgement (e.g. I Thes 1:8-9, which talks about the punishment of fire and eternal destruction). It's fairly easy to make out a case for annihilation of sinners, rather than their eternal torture. But it's very hard to believe that the NT writers believed in universal salvation. In order to support universal salvation, you pretty much have to do the same thing we do with women in the church, or the abolition of slavery: you have to say that there are implications of the Gospel that are present in the NT, but that the NT writers had not drawn out all of their consequences. E.g. with slavery, Paul seemed to allow it. Yet if you think about the kind of relationship he had in mind for masters and slaves, it's hard to see how slavery could ultimately survive. We can no longer think of slaves as property. They are now our brothers in Christ. If we really try to operate that way, in the end we are going to be led to challenge slavery itself. Similarly with the concept of judgement. There are some arguments in Paul that if we follow them out cast serious doubt on the conventional view of judgement. Consider I Cor 15:20 ff. This talks about Adam and Christ. As Adam's sin spread to all mankind, the second Adam's salvation spread to us all. "For just as all people die because of their union with Adam, in the same way all will be raised to life because of their union with Christ." Does this passage explicit teach universal salvation? If we didn't have I Thes and similar passages, I think we would say that it does. Certainly the logic of his argument would imply it. I Cor 15:22-24 talks about death being defeated and everything coming under Christ's headship. Col 1:20 and Eph 1:9-10 also talk about God's secret plan that eventually everything will come under Christ's headship. Rom 5:12ff also gives the Adam/Christ parallel. Like I Cor, it suggests that Christ undid what Adam did. In 5:18, Paul says that Christ sets all mankind free. The arguments from Paul seem very strong: Christ will eventually defeat sin and death and unite all mankind under his headship. Presumably this will happen at the second coming. There may still be punishment for those who reject God now, but eventually God will find a way to incorporate them in Christ. While these ideas can be gotten from Paul, in all honesty I have to say that passages such as I Thes 1 suggest that they are not conclusions that he himself drew. Either that, or he changed his mind. While we may be willing to say that Paul didn't have a chance to draw out all the implications of his thought, it's much harder for a Christian to argue this way about Jesus. On the other hand, whatever we may believe about Jesus' unity with the Father, it is clear that during his life he didn't teach about many of the themes that appear in Paul's letters. This may mean that Paul invented Christianity, and Jesus would be horrified. But the conventional explanation is that Jesus was unable during his life to speak about many of the things that appear in Paul's letters, because they can only be understood in the light of the resurrection. The arguments for universal salvation depend upon a concept of Christ's role that probably couldn't have been explained during his life. Note that universal salvation is not necessarily antithetical to judgement. I Cor. 15 suggests a distinction between those who have accepted Christ and others. While the others may be judged, they are not abandoned. Eventually God defeats death, and bring them all under Christ's headship. As I said above, I know how to construct this argument, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to follow it. However the point I was making in my response to you was not quite so far-reaching. It was that God had intended the Fall, but that it was part of his plan for salvation.