Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Defeating Calvinism, with a Little Help from a (so far back then) Calvinist · Great Bishop of Geneva!: Why is Romans 8 Not Prooftext for Calvinistic "Perseverance of the Saints"?
Predestination: Do we have a choice? | Ep 132
Allie Beth Stuckey, 1st of July 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTU0yP3EH24
3:05 Molina says God has sth like "scientia media"
A) God certainly has the knowledge of all possibilities;
B) God also has the knowledge of all things He ultimately decrees;
B U T
C) God also has an omniscient knowledge of all conditionals.
I e, God eternally knows what so and so will do if He gives him sanctifying grace, and what He won't do in such a case - and therefore God makes His decree on account of this.
9:46 The ones who finally reject God's offer, some would even add who don't hear of it at all, obviously do so:
- of free will
- which could have been otherwise, if God had given them certain graces, called the efficient grace
- but which cannot claim God did not give them sufficient grace
- and - here is Molina's view - if God did not give them the efficient grace, this is because God in His middle knowledge knew they would make too poor a usage of it.
Here I'd like to add a distinction. We as men on earth cannot say, "we can't bother for the salvation of so and so, he wouldn't use the grace very well" - but this doesn't mean such a concept doesn't exist, it means God reserves for Himself the right to withhold graces for such reasons.
If God gives an abortion provider who's on the death bed the grace of conversion just in the last minute, God has a hidden purpose with giving grace to someone who, to all human assessment, would be doing nothing to deserve the grace that saves him. He could for instance in heaven (or at first purgatory) be praying for the conversion of someone else, whom God knows will do lots more.
Either way, God is able to actually do an election with views of how he would use the grace.
That means, whether I'm too tired to pray for him, a full rosary, or whether someone else does, as I asked (also for the conversion of some convening in Boston), I have no right to beforehand wish him eternal damnation.
14:30 And he said: Therefore did I say to you, that no man can come to me, unless it be given him by my Father.
[John 6:66]
Note, it says of "unless it be given him by my Father" not of "comes" but of "can come" ...
14:37 It is not an automatic result.
15:03 One cannot deny freewill because God is all knowing.
I know you made this video, that doesn't mean I determined you should make it.
God eternally knew in advance you would make it. Also doesn't mean He determined it beyond your having any choice.
15:43 God offering you a real choice doesn't mean God abandons being sovereign - it means He uses His sovereignty in a very fine tuned manner.
16:13 No, predestination being the only option cannot be deduced from God's eternity.
Whatever happens happens because God has decreed it in a direct or indirect way, and the indirect way may involve decreeing it is decided by a created free will.
Your act right now is no more predetermined by God's knowing it when He created Heaven and Earth than it is determining what God knows when the Trump blows and the dead rise.
God's eternal being equally equates God's present view of your act with the latter as with the former.
A hunch, perhaps God's decision to become Man was His ideal way of granting men free will. Because God, as Man, can come to know what we do, can experience what we do as news.
16:23 Predestination being the only way to preserve God's omnipotence with omniscience is false.
It would mean God were somehow unable to control His omnipotence, which would make it not omnipotence.
Imagine God as a purely physical strength - just for a moment - turning the world around us - well, that would not make Him omnipotence as Christianity sees it, because He'd be too big to see, let alone direct anything about, the sparrows. The fine tuning of His own power that enables Him to decree about the sparrow, enables Him to decree that you have real freedom.
God's use of His own omnipotence is not as clumsy as someone able to play a piano only with his fists or with a sledgehammer.
17:07 Yes, God could stop anything, and do so any way He choses
God's omnipotence in face of your choice may be less of His decreeing it, and more of His allowing it. Being able to stop it and chosing not to.
17:33 A N D it is also not beyond possibilities that those He saves, He saves by giving them an offer such, that, even when they can resist it, they don't
The essential blasphemy of Calvin for which the Catholic Church condemned what He said on the TULIP matters is, he saw only irresistible grace as effective grace.
Calvin:
We are, before grace, slaves of Satan. Therefore God's only way to save us is to enslave us in His turn.
Catholicism:
We are, before grace, slaves of Satan. Therefore God's grace restores our freedom so we can receive it freely.
19:10 Did you just quote Romans 8:29?
For whom he foreknew, he also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of his Son; that he might be the firstborn amongst many brethren.
What exact foreknowledge are we talking about?
A foreknowledge of what results of His final decree of predestination, would not be a foreknowledge of which predestination was the consequence.
A foreknowledge totally independent of any predestination would not be resulting in predestination, it wouldn't leave room for any.
THEREFORE .... the foreknowledge St. Paul is speaking of is the foreknowledge called by Luis de Molina "scientia media" ...
Thanks for finding me a proof texts for Molinism!
19:21 Simultaneously an act of humans, and an act of God.
Sounds like what happens with a person in the state of grace.
Sounds like synergism.
Sounds like good works made in a state of grace actually earning us heavenly reward - because they are God's work.
I'm not sure Calvin said very much of this ... but St. Paul did.
Philippians 2:13, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, 1 Corinthians 12:6.
A Calvinist would say he worketh all in all, not just of the saved, but also of the damned, however, see the context in 1 Cor 12:
3 Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man, speaking by the Spirit of God, saith Anathema to Jesus. And no man can say the Lord Jesus, but by the Holy Ghost. 4 Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit; 5 And there are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord; 6 And there are diversities of operations, but the same God, who worketh all in all 7 And the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man unto profit.
So, St. Paul is saying God worketh all in all, in those who get saved, or in the Church, a collective defined by those who get saved.
19:41 "Like hardening pharao's heart" - I think I recall Jonathan Sarfati using this to argue Calvinism.
But let's recall, the same pharao hardened his heart himself first, so God's harding His heart was not bereaving him of real choice, but just finalising the choice He had already allowed him to make.
22:54 Most of what you said last few minutes is correct, however the Bible doesn't say God's grace is irresistible, and it would be clumsy of God to be able to ordain our salvation only by exchanging one unfreedom for another.
Also, "divine tension" - it's a tension for our understanding, but not for God.
23:35 and this means the ordained means contain, not just evangelising, but also the prayers of the saints.
Example. Jacob was predestined. However, his predestination would not have come to pass except for the prayers of ... looking up ... Isaac. Because Isaac prayed for his wife to conceive. And Jacob arguably grew in grace because of the prayers of his mother Rebecca, who loved him over Esau.
So, Genesis 25 is a Classic Catholic proofpassage of prayers of the saints contributing to predestination, not as its cause, but as means to its end.
25:59 While our free will is not the source of the grace, it is the thing God ordained as accepting it.
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