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ftd, DrE is the one who proposed the idea of the film preview by God before He created. Her view of God's foreknowledge and your view of God's foreknowledge are very similar. Both of you affirm that before creation (before time?) God KNEW all that would transpire and then set it in motion.

This is certainly a predestining things to definitely occur IN THAT God's foreknowledge would certainly without fail NEVER be wrong. It is predestination premised in foreknowledge. "Those he foreknew he predestined" is just as certainly unchangeable as is predetermination.

We must admit and deal with that truth. We are not far from DrE's position. The only real question is which came first: God's plan or God's foreknowledge. That is a distinction that is nigh onto impossible to untangle.

Therefore, I have decided that calvinism is NOT heretical. Calvinists are my brothers and sisters in Christ.

ftd, DrE is the one who proposed the idea of the film preview by God before He created. Her view of God's foreknowledge and your view of God's foreknowledge are very similar. Both of you affirm that before creation (before time?) God KNEW all that would transpire and then set it in motion.

I hadn't read her remarks on the subject.

I think other Calvinists like OPie and I and a few Arminians have offered some speculation at some length many months ago.

I think OPie and I pretty much advocated the idea that God exists outside the constraints of what we mere material creations call time. However, time itself is merely an aspect of God's creation and can hardly be described or imagined without reference to matter.

In this view, time is seen as a part of the construct of creation. And God is not subject to His own creation. He is entirely separate from any element of His creation and it all came forth at His will.

I think that God exists from all eternity, that before He created anything, there was nothing. Not even time. Because if there was no matter, there could hardly be time at least as we can define it. I think that God in some way exists throughout time simultaneously, an eternal Presence and Will, not subject to any physical laws of His universe, not even time. Clearly, this is an aspect of real eternity that we can scarcely conceive. It really does boggle the mind.

In viewing God in this way, Calvinists can readily offer compatible explanations for predestination and for man's free will. And all the rest of the Bible too.

The only real question is which came first: God's plan or God's foreknowledge.

The physics analogy is appropriate, just like we must accept the concept of "gravity" as a basis for understanding matter, even though it is purely hypotheoretical and impossible to prove. This wink and a nod allows us to utilize a common principle upon which we build our house of scientific sand.

So, too, is our paltry comprehension of God's enormous mystery. When we finally back ourselves into the ultimate questions of infinity and foreverness, our minds resist and sputter.

All that's left us then is faith. Like GWB said, ultimately God is not a matter of the mind; God is of the heart.

So in our struggle to wrap our minds around the impossible-to-logically-comprehend, it's valid to equate God's "plan" with God's "foreknowledge." Because it is all God -- immense, beyond understanding, more than total, impossible to fully grasp, and existing outside of time and space.

God's gift to our human brains was Scripture. Where Scripture ends, faith begins. Scripture speaks to our minds. Faith answers the questions of the heart and is truly the greatest gift.

From my experience, the acceptance of God's complete authorship of every nanosecond in existence, came when my brain finally collapsed in exhaustion from contemplating the inexplicable wonder of it all. I surrendered.

God's plan. God's foreknowledge, current knowledge, post-knowledge, supra-knowledge -- that's all there is and ever was. I yield to its overpowering inevitability.

And that surrender has been exhilarating. I see it anew every day. It was there all along, but I was blind to it.

ftd, DrE is the one who proposed the idea of the film preview by God before He created. Her view of God's foreknowledge and your view of God's foreknowledge are very similar. Both of you affirm that before creation (before time?) God KNEW all that would transpire and then set it in motion. This is certainly a predestining things to definitely occur IN THAT God's foreknowledge would certainly without fail NEVER be wrong. It is predestination premised in foreknowledge. "Those he foreknew he predestined" is just as certainly unchangeable as is predetermination.

While nothing in time can happen without God allowing it to happen, that is not the same thing as predestination which is a particular doctrine for a particular group of people, the Church.

It simply means that when someone got in Christ, by faith, that person was now predestinated to be conformed to the image of Christ.

That is New Testament, not Old.

It is also the basis of eternal security.

We must admit and deal with that truth. We are not far from DrE's position. The only real question is which came first: God's plan or God's foreknowledge. That is a distinction that is nigh onto impossible to untangle.

Not at all, what came first is God's Omniscience, which saw all the possible and then God chose the best plan to accomplish that which gave Him pleasure (Rev.4:11), that was the creation of creatures who could freely love Him.

To give Angels/Mankind that freedom meant some would say 'no' as well as 'yes' which meant sin would come into the Universe.

However, the alternative of creating creatures without that ability to freely love Him would not have been pleasing to God, nor gloryifing to Him.

Therefore, I have decided that calvinism is NOT heretical. Calvinists are my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Calvinists may well be Christians, just as there are believers in every denomination, and as such are our brothers and sisters in Christ. But Calvinism is heresy since it is blasphemy against the attributes of God and makes God a distant unknowable God (a mystery God) and not the God of the Bible.