We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

If God Chose Us Before Creation, How Can We Be Free? (podcast)

What was predestined and what wasn’t? Greg sorts it all out in this haunting episode, millions and millions of years in the making.

Episode 505

predestined

Send Questions To:

Dan: @thatdankent
Email: askgregboyd@gmail.com
Twitter: @reKnewOrg


Greg’s new book: Inspired Imperfection
Dan’s new book: Confident Humility


Subscribe:

    Stitcher        

Related Reading

If God shouldn’t get blamed when free agents do evil, why should he be thanked when they do good?

Scripture tells us that every good gift comes from God the Father who “does not change like shifting shadows” (Ja 1:17).  I interpret this to mean that God is always good and that he’s always working for good. In all circumstances, Paul said, “God is working for the good” (Rom. 8:28). We live and move…

Rethinking Election: Romans 9, Part 1

Many people believe that Romans 9 demonstrates that God has the right and power to save whichever individuals he wants to save and damn whichever individuals he wants to damn. I’ll call this the “deterministic” reading of Romans 9, for it holds that God determines who will be saved and who will be lost. On…

If every effect has a cause, how can there be free choice?

The most common argument given in defense of determinism is that it’s implied in the nature of causation. Every event has a cause, and this cause accounts for the event being the way it is. This cause must itself have had a cause that accounts for it, and so on ad infinitum. Hence, everything must…

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…

If salvation depends on our free choice, how are we saved totally by grace?

Question: I’m an Arminian-turned-Calvinist, and the thing that turned me was the realization that if salvation hinges on whether individuals choose to be saved or not, as Arminians and Open Theists believe, then we can’t say salvation is 100% by grace. If we have to choose for or against God, then the credit for our…

Confronting Divine Determinism

Part of the fallen human condition inclines us to shirk our moral responsibility and accept that everything is predetermined, whether by God, the gods, fate, or blind chance. Various forms of determinism have been prevalent in most primitive religions, in much ancient philosophy, in most forms of Islam and even, most surprisingly, in much traditional…