About Providence, Divine Action and the Church


In this blog, Terry J. Wright posts thoughts and shares research on the Christian doctrine of providence. This doctrine testifies to God’s provision for all things through creation’s high priest, the man Christ Jesus. However, the precise meaning and manner of this provision is a perpetually open question, and this blog is a forum for discussion of the many issues relating to providence and the place of the Church within God’s action.

Monday 25 June 2012

What Does God Determine?

Rather than think that God must always do the same thing, we may think of God relating differently but appropriately to every level of organization of the universe. He may operate in a deterministic way at some points and in an indeterminate way at other points.

Harry Lee Poe and Jimmy H. Davis, God and the Cosmos: Divine Activity in Space, Time and History (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), p. 120

I’m sympathetic to this claim, but further elucidation is necessary, namely, how do we know when and at what level God operates deterministically or indeterministically? Of course, at this early stage in God and the Cosmos, this claim appears more to indicate what’s to come in the later stages of the book. There’s also an echo here from John Sanders’s The God Who Risks. I haven’t read this book since, ooh, 2002 or 2003, but I’m sure Sanders argues that God determines some things but not others. Can anyone help me out here on this latter point?

2 comments:

  1. Yes I can help you out by pointing to a completely different Illuminated Understanding of Truth and Reality.

    http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-god.aspx

    http://global.adidam.org/truth-book/true-spiritual-practice-3.html

    http://www.adidam.org/teaching/gnosticon/etheric-astral-culture.aspx

    http://global.adidam.org/books/ancient-teachings.html

    Even to "explain" your own seeming appearance here you would have to take into account how the entire Cosmic Process (beginning from day one), with all of its space-time paradoxes, somehow coalesced to create the body-mind-complex that you now identify with.

    Both conventional exoteric religion with its so called "theology, and materialism eliminate the paradox from Reality. They both make Reality seem to be rather "pat" and thus under control, which is PRECISELY the purpose of both.

    Conventional exoteric religion is essentially a rather childish, even infantile affair. Its "God" is just an extension of mommy and daddy.

    Scientism is essentially an adolescent affair - reacting to the mommy-daddy "God" of conventional exoteric religion.

    Ultimately not a single thing is under your control.

    The presumption of "you" is not inspected. "You" is as much a paradox as "water", "atom", "sky", "big-bang". You have not actually investigated the matter and found a concrete "you". "You" or "I" is merely a particle of common speech. To speak it suggests that you know what you are talking about. But there is no such something - independent, discrete, like a particle. There is nothing to it but a tightly bound fear saturated ball of thought that would not be penetrated by the Paradox of Reality.

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