This hardly follows. For what you say to be true, God would have to be unable to know what choices individual human beings would make. God is outside time itself, which is itself a created thing. Past, present, and future as we experience them do not apply to God.
I have no problem with God being outside of time and already knowing everything that is going to happen as we experience it. God did know. But, even when you suppose the POSSIBILITY that the Romans and Jews did not "kill" Jesus you would require that the Bible would have to be completely written around the other scenario. God would have had to invent a completely new way to salvation.
IOW, you are saying that God's plan is built around the decisions of men. I think that takes away from God's sovereignty. You also take away from Jesus that He gave up His life voluntarily to save us. You are supposing that Jesus could have lived until old age, but that men overpowered Him using their free will and killed Him. By this, Jesus is a very weak God indeed.
All that is necessary is for the source of prophecy to know what did, does, and will happen. This argument from prophecy in support of predestinationist theories implies that the only alternative is for God to be inside time, experiencing it in the same as as his creatures do, waiting with bated breath to find out what is going to happen in human history. He is, of course, not.
Again, you are saying that God builds around man. God doesn't have to be inside time for predestination to work. God just has to be in full control, which you appear to deny.
FK: ... either Jesus was super duper lucky for things to turn out the way they did in order to accomplish what the Father sent Him to do ...
Why would Jesus be super duper lucky to know what would happen? To say this is to imply that I am saying that Christ was ignorant of the future. Please don't insult non-Calvinists that way.
I didn't mean to be insulting, I was trying to show that God does not work around man. And, I gave you an "OR" statement along with the above. It was: "maybe it's possible that God actually had a hand in arranging that all the necessary things took place." If you think I accused you of the first, it then appears that you reject the second. God's sovereignty is lowered again.
Did Christ pretend to hunger, pretend to thirst, pretend to suffer pain, pretend to be tired, pretend to sweat?
No, because it was God's intention that Jesus go through these things as a man on earth. It was obviously not God's intention that Jesus grow old and die of natural causes. I know that because it didn't happen and God always gets what He wants. He has that kind of authority.
The Calvinist/predestinationist theory does indeed hold together, as do many theoretical constructs, but only if one is willing to believe that God created a humankind full of automatons, rather than creatures who are created in the image of God -- free to choose God or not.
I can understand your aversion to God being in control of everything. I used to believe just as you about this. However, if we truly believe in a sovereign God, then I don't see any other answer. How powerful is our God? Of course, we don't experience being automatons, we don't know the future. But, God is still in full control, even of the sin He knows about but does not create. About a week ago, Dr. Eckleburg posted an excellent link to an article that is dead on point with our discussion. At least you can know where we are coming from much better than I can say it. :)
Not only this but if man was truly free to make his decisions, then how would God know what decision man would make BEFORE man was created? Simply by observing? This shows no interaction of God.
"I can understand your aversion to God being in control of everything. I used to believe just as you about this."
Well, I used to believe just as you do, so that makes us even! :-)
It has little to do with my aversion to God's being in control. I, after all, am not the one who determines the conditions of God's existence.
It has rather everything to do with the consistent traditional understanding of Christianity prior to the Calvinist branch of the Reformation: that man has the free will to choose God or reject him. This traditional understanding had come down from the Apostles. If TULIP had been one of the key teachings of the Apostles, one would expect to find it expounded on in detail in the early Church Fathers.
It is God who seemingly (at the risk of attributing human emotions and experiences to him) was/is averse to having the pinnacle of his creation be a sort of flesh and blood robot, whose existence is that of a marionette who only thinks that he is making decisions every day to sin or not -- to choose God or reject him.
Which God is the more powerful -- a God who must control and predetermine every second of the history of the universe, or the God who creates a universe with which he interacts and treats his created beings with the respect of allowing them to choose to love him or reject him?
If a king has the authority and ability to put anyone to death in his kingdom that he chooses, is the fact that he fails to kill everyone in his kingdom somehow proof that he doesn't have that authority and ability? Would his granting of self-determination to his subjects mean that by definition he really didn't have the authority and ability to compell them to do what he wants?
Does a husband have to control every aspect of his wife's life to be the head of the home? Does a parent need to control every aspect of his child's life in order to be the parent rather than a peer? And these are just poor shadows in our earthly life that only hint at what the relationship between us and God is.
The idea that by God choosing to give free choice to certain of his creatures, he ceased being all-powerful really doesn't make sense. The idea that there are only two choices: a God who has predetermined and forced every event of every second of history, or a God who is buffeted and helpless -- is a false dichotomy.
As an Orthodox Christian, I can see why Calvinists came up with the idea of predestination. God had, in the West, developed into a pretty legalistic and juridical concept. A God who seeks vengeance and bloody satisfaction right and left, and who is seemingly pretty hard to please would leave one in a chronic state of anxiety, no matter how hard one tried to please him.
Calvinism took away this state of anxiety by using St. Augustine's speculations on predestination writ large.
One of the things that sometimes strikes people who explore Orthodoxy is the justaposition of a non-legalistic approach to the faith with what is a very morally and ascetically strict Christian life; and a complete unwillingness to state that one is or is not "saved," with a simultaneous lack of anxiety about one's future.