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Lighten Up: Open Theism T-Shirt
Category: General, Lighten Up
Tags: Choice, Free Will, freedom, Lighten Up, Open Theism
Related Reading
Is Free Will compatible with Predestination?
Question: Isn’t “freedom” simply our ability to do what we want? And if this is so there seems to be no incompatibility between saying that a person is “free” on the one hand, but predestined (or at least foreknown) by God, on the other. But why do you say that freedom is not compatible with…
What is Open Theism?
Open Theism is the view that God chose to create a world that included free agents, and thus a world where possibilities are real. The future is pre-settled, to whatever degree God wants to pre-settle it and to whatever degree the inevitable consequences of the choices of created agents have pre-settled it. But the future…
Revelation 17:8 refers to people whose names haven’t been written in “the book of life from the creation of the world.” Doesn’t this conflict with open theism?
As in Revelation 13:8, the clause “from the foundation” (apo kataboleis) need not mean “from before the foundation” but simply “from the foundation” (= since the foundation). It’s not that names either were or were not written in the “book of life” before they were ever born. Rather, throughout history, in response to the choices…
What is the significance of Exodus 32:33 ?
The Lord says “I will blot out of my book” all those who persist in rebellion against him. If everything is eternally foreknown by God, one wonders why he would have recorded in his “book” the names of people who were to be blotted out eventually (cf. Rev. 3:5). Indeed, if God foreknew that certain…
A Very Brief History of Open Theism
While the open view of the future has always been a very minor perspective, it has had its defenders throughout Church history and it has never been called “heresy” (until in mid 1990s when some started using this label). According to some African American church leaders, it has been the predominant view in the African…