Posted on 05/12/2015 12:17:08 PM PDT by Gamecock
Pope Francis warned the rich and powerful on Tuesday that God will judge them on whether they fed the poor and cared for the Earth
"We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat. But we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment one day," he said. "And there it will be revealed if they really tried to provide for him in every person, and if they did what they could to preserve the environment so that it could produce this food."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Good post.
Does God, in your view, control every choice of every person?
You're speaking then, specifically of the Christians in Iraq and Syria and other areas bloodied by ISIS?
As I mentioned in my other posts, this is not "my view", but the teaching of Scripture.
Prov. 16:9
The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.
Prov. 16:1
The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.
Prov. 20:24
Man's steps are ordained by the Lord, how then can man understand his way?
Prov. 21:1
The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord, He turns it wherever He wishes.
Keep in mind, this is Solomon speaking of himself. And, there are perhaps 50 additional specific references outside of Proverbs indicating God's specific control over the decisions of man. The Scriptures, however, make it clear that God created everything everything (sic) and we live and move and have our being in Him (Acts 17:28). There is nothing that can possibly be "outside" of His influence. That is because He is God of Heaven and Earth.
Is it your view (similar to the Openness theology of the Open Theists) that God does not control everything?
I have no problem accepting all of what you wrote.
However, I also have my doubts as to whether this is what Pope Francis *means*.
It’s pretty clear that he has bought into the global warming fraud — as well as its socialist-oriented remedies — hook, line, and sinker.
And that, not sensible environmentally-conscious activities like you mention, is what the Pope is really pushing. And what he says GOD will judge us for: not going along with the global warming income-redistribution and elite-enrichment scam.
That alarms me, not least because those most strongly aligned with the global warming fraud are not Christian in nature, but rather atheistic and pagan.
And paganism and creation-worship and its close ally, human pride and confidence in human solutions, I assure you, is definitely counter to GOD’s will and His plan.
Who is talking about forcing anybody to anything?
The whole point of the quotation was to show the need to feed the poor and to cherish and protect what God has given us.
Nobody said anything about governments.
I don’t know what is going to be in it per se, so I am not worked up about it.
He chooses what he writes and doesn’t ask my opinion.
People thought Benedict was going to write a bunch of encyclicals about discipline and dogmatic things. He didn’t. His first encyclical was Deus Caritas Est.
Since he hasn’t written the encyclical yet, I am withholding judgement.
John Paul said that our that our ecological responsibility is “not only for the present, but also for future generations.” He added: “The dominion granted to man by the Creator is not an absolute power … to dispose of things as one pleases…. When it comes to the natural world, we are subject not only to biological laws but also to moral ones, which cannot be violated with impunity” (Evangelium Vitae, 42).
When Francis speaks on the environment, he'll be (hopefully in a vein of Catholic moral continuity, not pagan/Marxism) continuing the ecological teaching by several previous popes, including our beloved Pope Benedict XVI.
Despite that, people are simply caterwauling now about what they imagine the pope will say.
If he alleges as a "fact" that the globe is dangerously warming, and/or that it's caused by rising CO2 levels, or that it's caused by cow-farts or coal-fired generating plants or the internal combustion engine, I'll be among the fist to stride to the mic (as if anyone would offer me a mic) shouting, "You're outside your competence there, Pope Francis!" His competence is in faith and morals, not in prudential judgments about centuries-long geophysical processes or political policy preferences. Sometimes those appear tangled together. It's within the competence of the laity to untangle them.
If the message gets totally scrambled, it'll be our fault (I'm including "my" in "our") --- our fault as the laity, because it is to us that action "in the world" is entrusted.
Interesting to note your compost pile exudes the same things humans exude. The green house fight is a poorly disguised fight against humans and life in general. Guess the mass murders were not content with killing 100 million last year outright. Socialism kills.
Francis needs to shut his pope hole.
What the Pope should be shouting about is that Catholic Charities will no longer be paid to relocate Muslim “refugees” from the Middle East to Boise, Idaho and Yakima WA and will instead focus all their energy and resources on rescuing and relocating Christian refugees to safety in the USA and other interested countries.
Oh yes. Any program to make war on carbon emissions, has to make war on carbon-based life forms.
That's only to state the obvious. Nothing could even exist without God's continuous willing it to exist.
“do you understand “free will” to mean the unaided ability to decide a future choice without the intervention of God?”
Well, that would have to depend on what you define as “intervention”, because we wouldn’t be here to decide anything if God hadn’t created us, and designed us with a capacity for reason. Other than that, though, yes, I’d say free will is the ability to make a decision of your own volition.
No argument here Mr. Don, but I would say to those who would follow this heretical ‘pope’ and beliee and hang on his every pronouncement: quo vadis?
Well, we are part of the way there...do you object to answering the question I asked at the end of my post?
Ping to 124. You are by God’s control ignoring His control.
I didn’t understand the question at the end of your post. I don’t know what “the Openness theology of the Open Theists” is, nor do I know the names and descriptions of the alternatives to this.
If your assertion were true, that we have no free will, then God would be a monster. He would be condemning some to death and sparing others arbitrarily, since he decided all their thoughts and actions for them, so “sin” cannot exist. He also commands us to love Him and one another, when that is impossible, because love must be freely chosen, so “righteousness” cannot exist either. Those are just a couple of the contradictions that your interpretation gives rise to.
You are reducing God to a child stomping on ant hills.
Fair enough...I did not intend to trap you, so I'll try to fill in the blanks. The Open Theists believe that God has "omniscience" (full and unlimited knowledge) of what can be known. Since the future is being determined by uncontrolled, free-will agents (mankind) and those decisions are being made in real time, God does not know what they are going to choose or do. That is, the future cannot be known, so God learns about it (and responds to it) just as we do...as it unfolds.
If He did know what you were about to choose to think, do or say in the next minute, that "thing" He knew about you would be "fixed" because it would be the only thing that you could do. If that were the case, you would not be truly "free" to do something without His control.
Some of the advocates of this "Openness" were Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, et al. I provide a quote from Boyd: "Much of it [the future], open theists will concede, is settled ahead of time, either by God's predestining will or by existing earthly causes, but it is not exhaustively settled ahead of time. To whatever degree the future is yet open to be decided by free agents, it is unsettled."
So far as I am aware, the only other alternative to this view is the one I quoted from Scripture set out prior: God is managing everything, every decision, every action, every moment. This is why prophecy always occurs right on time; this is why God has perfect foreknowledge. He is causing everything to occur in precisely the manner in which it occurs. Foreknowledge is related to Foreordination which is related to Predestination. The reason we need not fear is not because we can figure out how to respond, but because God is, "causing all things to work together for our good." God really is God. Absolute, unlimited transcendent sovereignty.
Hopefully, this is enough of a snapshot to help you answer the question posed differently...Is it your view that the future is unsettled because of the decisions of "free agents"?
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