What are my thoughts about predestination? I certainly don’t believe it is God’s way of working with humanity.

Predestination, in its most severe form, takes all responsibility from humans and places it on God. Taken to its logical ends, predestination makes it impossible for anyone to judge someone else or their actions. Criminals cannot be punished because they were just acting as God willed them to. If they are punished it makes both God and the punisher cruel. First, it makes God cruel because he is the cause of the action. Second, it makes the inflicter of punishment cruel because he is punishing a man for something that man had no control over. To put it in a paraphrase of Pelagius, “God holds us responsible for our sins…and that would scarcely be fair unless wehvae the power to stop sinning.” (Placher, History of Christian Theology, 115) Augustine argued that God helps those who cannot help themselves, those who are seduced by and addicted to sin. Therefore, according to Augustine God elects to free some and leave others in slavery.

The question is simple: who acts first, God or man? Does God have to “turn you on” to Christianity, or does man have to first seek God? God, of course, had to act first by creating humanity, then after the entrance of sin by creating a means of salvation. He made the world and built the Yellow Brick Road, but it’s up to us to begin following that road. To say that God both built and guides us to that road makes us little more than God’s toys. This view of God brings to mind a child who re‑enacts in play a story. There’s no room for diviation, for the players (toys, or humans in Augustine’s universe) already have their parts written for them. There’s no rehersal, simply the dry boring performance for the joy of the child. God is not a child who is playing house with the universe. God wrote the play but it’s up to choose which part we will play.

As all of God’s creation is good, though, and becomes evil only when misused or abused, man must have implanted in him some sort of longing to be good. Kreeft says something similar to this in his book Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing. At first I scoffed at this idea, but the more I think of the alternative ‑‑ predestination ‑‑ it seems the only logical path.

Predestination also presents another large problem. Christ died so that all might have eternal life. However, if God only chooses some for salvaion (Or as Gottschalk thought, others to damnation) then Jesus only died for those elect few.

Predestination goes a long way in understanding the sexism often associated with Christianity. Whether it’s just forbidding women to speak in church or saying men have the right to exact their “God‑given authority” by use of physical violence, many Christians feel that men have been given from God authority over women. Some Christians believe that men are born somehow better than women, and that’s how God created it. If someone can believe that God would create someone predestined to be damned for eternity it is certainly easy to think of God creating someone to be inferior during their earthly life.

I reject this notion, though. I refuse to believe that God would create one being inferior to another and that it rests entirely on the chance of being born a woman rather than a man.

3:30 PM

I got a letter from Laurel today. It was mostly pretty boring, but there was something about my apology. She said she “gladly accepts it.” She said she was just a little disgusted with me for not trusting her…that in fact it was an understatement to say she was just a little disgusted with me. That makes me feel really good…I really screwed up there. And again Wednesday. But that’s another story.