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To: D-fendr
Of that He wishes to control. Omnipotent includes God granting man free will....This is the aspect that Calvinists often conflate and confuse.

There are only two types of wills; God's will and man's will. God's will=good. Man's will=bad. I don't see what is confusing about that. In fact, I find Calvinist rather simple to understand. Man has the same nature, man makes same bad choices, God saves men in the same way, etc.

What I find confusing is people saying:

Now that's confusing. No wonder people embrace Open Theism.

IOW: We're saved unknown and for unknowable reasons.

Not quite. We do know we are called according to His purpose to bear fruit to bring glory to God. Every Christian does this in some form or fashion. How we bear fruit is not always known.

10,779 posted on 11/08/2007 12:55:51 PM PST by HarleyD (97% of all statistics are made up.)
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To: HarleyD; D-fendr

“God’s will=good. Man’s will=bad”

God made man in His image and “likeness” . That likeness is to “will” to love. What you just wrote makes God a lier.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church..
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PF.HTM

THE REVELATION OF GOD

I. God Reveals His “Plan of Loving Goodness”

51 “It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will. His will was that men should have access to the Father, through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the Holy Spirit, and thus become sharers in the divine nature.”2

52 God, who “dwells in unapproachable light”, wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son.3 By revealing himself God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing him and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity.

53 The divine plan of Revelation is realized simultaneously “by deeds and words which are intrinsically bound up with each other”4 and shed light on each another. It involves a specific divine pedagogy: God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural Revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons repeatedly speaks of this divine pedagogy using the image of God and man becoming accustomed to one another: the Word of God dwelt in man and became the Son of man in order to accustom man to perceive God and to accustom God to dwell in man, according to the Father’s pleasure.5

This shold make perfect sense to anyone.


10,780 posted on 11/08/2007 1:15:37 PM PST by stfassisi ("Above all gifts that Christ gives his beloved is that of overcoming self"St Francis Assisi)
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To: HarleyD
Thanks for your reply:

God is all powerful, yet unable to save the lost;

Why would you think God, or anyone, who chooses not to do something is therefore unable to do it? Non sequitor.

Forced love is not love.

God is all knowing yet saves someone not knowing if that person will fall away,

Again, a confusion of foreknowing combined with the fallacy of OSAS.

God is all present except for the time that Adam took the fruit from Eve.

Huh?

10,799 posted on 11/08/2007 3:31:38 PM PST by D-fendr (Deus non alligatur sacramentis sed nos alligamur.)
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