Posted by
Andrews on Monday, June 30, 2008 12:37:55 PM
Leaving aside for a moment my usual political topics, I would like to spend a moment thinking about the doctrine of predestination. At one time, when much younger and more foolish, I argued that the doctrine of predestination seemed a license to sin. After all, if G-d had decided beforehand who was saved and who was not, what is the point of virtuous living? If all the good deeds and faith in the world could not change your fate, then why not live as you wished, knowing that nothing you did could change your fate.
And, if we were discussing a G-d stuck in the material plane, like the pagan divinities of old, that would probably be a good argument. Were G-d chained to the material plane, living in time along with us, then it would be absurd of him to choose one to save and one to damn before they had acted.
But, G-d is not trapped in the material plane, nor is He subject to time. As I
argued before when discussing free will, He created time and exists outside of it, so he knows who will be saved and who will be damned simply because he can see all of existence from beginning to end. He is not sitting at the beginning of time and saying "X will be saved" without knowing what they will do, He his seeing the whole of X's life and saying "X will be saved".
Thus, in reality, predestination is nothing but a recognition of G-d's omniscience, that he knows who will be damned and who will be saved before they have acted. It does not say our actions will have no effect on our fate, only that the effect of those actions has already been taken into account*. Which means that, despite what I once thought, predestination is not a license to live as one wishes, it simply is a recognition of G-d's omniscience.
I know this is probably nothing new to many people, but it is interesting to me, to realize that once we stop thinking of G-d as a temporal being like ourselves, it solves so many of the philosophical conundrums surrounding him.
Well, back to my more mundane posts now. Thank you for indulging the amateur theologian in me for a moment.
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* Please, no arguments over whether salvation is through grace alone or through deeds. I am simply arguing that if deeds play a role then that has already been taken into account.(For that matter, this isn't even my argument. I am not Christian, so the whole question of grace is irrelevant to me, being of New Testament origin. The Torah [or Tanakh if you want to include all of "The Old Testament"] is definitely driven by rules not grace.)