'The Passion of the Christ' (Hugh Hewitt on impact of Mel Gibson's controversial new film )

Actually, there is no division within the invisible Church - there is one accord - harmony and unity. What you see in the temporal is division within the visible church. Two reasons for that: the Body of Christ cannot yet meet in one time/space and; there are tares within the visible church - pretenders.

See with your spiritual eyes and you will apprehend that the invisible Church is one in Christ. When we worship, He doesn't come to us - we go to Him at His throne. In worship, there is an intersection of time and eternity, heaven and earth. It is as the writer of Hebrews outlines in Chapter 12: 22 & 23.

please go back and read my previous posts in this thread, as well as others to see that the choice, mitigated and empowered by the Holy Spirit, is a requirement for salvation. No we cannot do it on our own, but neither does God force salvation on anyone.

Jesus himself points that out in Revelation 3:20
20“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me."

Notice He says absolutely nothing about beating the door down and forcing the one within to comply with His Will.

absolutely also true! The apparent paradox here has to do with the fact that we do NOT comprehend things in the same way God does. Remember omniscience and omnipresence means that God is everywhere and every*when* simultaneously. Moreover He is both inside of and beyond all space and time. Therefore, He knows everything always - which means He already knows which way we're going to choose. That does NOT mean that our free will is abrogated, but rather that although Christ died once for all, He knew that not everyone would choose to follow Him. Even so *He* *chose* to die for us anyway.

The problem some people have with this is that they attempt to see a cause-effect relationship in a situation where God already knew/knows the end results. God does not change, nor does he contradict himself, therefore He gifted us human beings with free will and it would have been self-contradictory if He had subsequently taken it away...or do you deny the validity of Rev. 3:20?

Yeah, I knew that would attract a Calvinist tract. Been there, debated that. Not that any of that stuff you said is untrue... It's just that it's not the whole story.

First, understand that God doesn't exist merely *in* time. Picture the universe as a book. It's there, written... all of it. God sees it as it is: The beginning, middle and end. To him, it's not changing. To we whose consciousness is *in* time, it's like we're just reading through it. We can grasp so little of it, it seems to us to be constantly changing. It's not like he is surprised half-way through the book by the choice we made, but neither is it that he creates a character, then erases it, replacing it with a different character.

When someone makes a free choice, "free" means that its not based on any outside factor. If I offer you a baseball tickets or a carton of OJ, and you are stuc, stranded in the desert dying of thirst, you will choose the OJ. That's not freely chosen; your cicumstances dictated it.

So a free choice is based on the characteristics of the person making the choosing. It's like Predestinationists think we're saying that the choice is based on some outside, arbitrary factor. It's based on who we are as the creation of God.

It's about where you put the accent. To deny free will is to render the moral decisions we make meaningless, and to isolate our past from our future.

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