HS asked me if Jehovah knows everything.
HS also asked me to define Jehovism.
On the first point, John Calvin said both 1) God knows everything and, therefore, 2) God knew the fate of every future human being before He created them.
CS Lewis points out in his Screwtape Letters that God and Satan do not live in time the way man does. So in his theology, this simple cause-and-effect logic of Calvin would not work.
Calvin said God looks at time and knowledge the same way we do. Then he contradicted himself completely.
Calvin would have been on firmer ground if he had not gone on to JUSTIFY why God created humans to be damned.
Creating humans to spend eternity in despair and pain violates every concept of human justice. It also defied everything Jesus demanded of us.
If God used the same sense of justice Christ requires us to use, nothing would be more Satanic than creating people to be damned.
Remember, those who agree that Jehovah (JHWH) created men to be damned are the same people who object violently to the idea of creating even insensate embryos to be destroyed to help human beings. So we are forbidden to create totally unknowing embryos to be destroyed. But God’s creating humans for unending agony is just great.
So how did Calvin justify God’s creating humans to spend eternity in unimaginable agony?
He said God’s logic is not our logic. Calvin said that God does not look at reality the way we do. He said that to God Mercy means something entirely different from the mercy Christ talked about.
At the same time, Calvin’s whole theology is based on the idea that “knowledge” and “time” are exactly the same thing to God as they are to humans.
Does God see knowledge as we do? Does God see time as we do? You have to know all that in order to say whether, in OUR terms, “God knows everything.”
So Calvin said the logic of God is perfectly explicable in the case of predestination and totally opaque in the case of predestination.
Calvin was a genius. In my opinion Calvin was the greatest human theologian who ever lived. So how am I to question him?
In cases like this, I take the advice Jesus gave me. He faced the Sanhedrin, which held that God was to be explained by old men who knew the Old Testament, just as Calvin did.
Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children. Children, like me, simply have no idea how the mind of God works. We have no idea whether the question, “Does God know everything?” means anything to God.
I do not know the mind of God. I don’t believe YOU know the mind of God.
Jesus gave me a tiny glimpse of God the Father, the God who was totally alien to the Old Testament experts, the men of the Sanhedrin who judged Him.
Jehovists, then and now, say that Jehovah gave theologians a total understanding of all there is to know about God the Father.
Which leads me to the definition of Jehovism. Jehovism is the Sanhedrin, the Communist theoretician, the Moslem Imam. The Jehovist’s cosmology comes from Karl Marx or Jehovah. To the Jehovist, seventy percent of the Bible is the Old Testament. To a Jehovist, every word of every Jewish prophet — if he spoke Hebrew — is as unerring as the words of Jesus.
Jehovism gets some really nasty conclusions from the Old Testament.
Jehovism says that you must kill witches.
Oops! Maybe that word meant “poisoner.”
Oh, well, these little problems happen.
Jehovists said the earth has to be the center of the universe, so they burned people who said otherwise.
Oops.
If you read the New Testament, you would have real trouble burning heretics. Jesus said specifically that he and his disciples were NOT like those who said, “You are for me or you are against me.”
It takes a lot of the vengefulness of the Old Testament to cover up the words of Jesus, but it has always been done by both Catholics and Protestants. They both burned heretics:
“You are for me or you are against me.”
Both the Catholics and the Protestants of the religious wars were committed Jehovists, so the words of Jesus were buried in the “seventy percent of the Bible” that speaks of Jehovah.
Jehovism says that God has an endless hunger for praise. Jesus never once said we should praise the Lord.
Pagan gods had a hunger for praise. Jeus demanded that we love God, that we sincerely ask for His forgiveness.
That is NOT the message of the semi-pagan JHWH of the Old Testament. He wants what every pagan god wants.
The Jews got their higher ideas of God the Father, the God of Jesus, from Zoroastriansim. The Zoroastrian Magi accepted the same Christ that the Jews rejected.
In America, the Calvinist church of the pilgrims ended up rejecting Christ and becoming Unitarian. They dropped the thirty percent of the Bible in favor of the logic of the seventy percent.
To me, the Old Testament is the story of the road from paganism. To a Jehovist, the Old Testament is, from beginning to end, the same as the words of Christ.
Calvin was obsessed with the idea that God was the tribal Jehovah of the Jews. So he and Luther cut out the last four hundred years of the Old Testament because it was written in Greek, not in Hebrew.
Jehovism is the worship of the tribal God of the Jews. It looks at God, not as the Being of whom Jesus gave us a slight glimpse in the New Testament, but as a semi-pagan being whose entire personality is described in detail in the Old Testament.
But if God is nothing but the old JHWH, why didn’t Jesus just join the Sanhedrin? Why didn’t Jesus just quote the Old Testament instead of using it as background to His parables? Why were the Magi, who were totally ignorant of “seventy percent of the Bible,” the ones who accepted the Christ?
I accept the wisdom of Odinism as my Old Testament. I accept the pursuit of knowledge as the way I can do unto others as I would have them to do unto me. I can help the lame to walk only if I know the facts about legs and the spinal cord. Knowing the entire Old Testament backwards in Hebrew will not help anyone else.
But for the Jehovist, all that really matters is knowing the Old Testament as it was written in Hebrew.
I think that’s sick.
#1 by H.S. on 11/27/2004 - 4:18 pm
Bob,
How many pages (approximately-not nitpick) of John Calvin’s work have you actually read for yourself? (It doesn’t matter whether they were his French (native), Latin or German scripts, or just English translations – remembering you mentioned at some point that you read and speak several different languages)?
Are you stating about him what you have in the blog from knowing first-hand what you read or from you have read or heard about him?
You have obviously read C.S. Lewis (British like you) and resonate with his reasoning about religious ideas — apparently even his confessed fantasy having no Christian meanings admittedly ever intended by him.
Do you consider yourself to be a child of a lesser god?
Or for the time at hand a child of one god?
Or possibly a child of the god currently in authority – one who has learned enough to “save” humans from “something” out there mysterious and unknown?
I suppose I don’t know why you name yourself a Christian vs. a Zorastrian (because of the Magi).
And that is not to say whatsoever that I do not understand and join you in your frustration of evil and wrong (when it really is) being perpetrated by people saying Christ authorizes them to do it. For what is evil and wrong does not exist except it be defined by our Creator God. With no understanding and acceptance of the right and wrong being stamped onto the creation is indeed whatever is right or wrong in every man’s eyes.
It *is* foolishness to entertain discussion of what is right or wrong outside what the Divine – the Creator – the Mastermind of our universe has stated it will be.
Who else could tell us those things but that Divine Entity Itself in whatever terms and way determined by that Divine?
Only that Entity can define the Way in which we approach and get that information. Being merely creatures, that Entity will give us that Way.
What is was Created. It is an awesome thought to wrap around if you believe that man can count the seeds in an apple – but only the Creator of all can count the apples in a seed.
But from what you have tried to say it looks as if you do not believe that. The Creator of all would have to wait to *see* how many apples actually made it.
#2 by Richard L. Hardison on 11/27/2004 - 6:23 pm
The idea that God possesses exhaustive knowledge is not biblical. It is hellinist, and the concept came into christianity through Ambrose and Augustine. The statement “he knows the end from beginning” does not support such a concept either. Many have predicted the political situation we have now based upon the the manner of the founding. That does not make them God simply because they could that. All it requires is knowledge of human nature.
Speaking for myself, I’ve read ALL of Calvin’s “Institutes.” There are few good insights in it, but mostly it’s of little worth to a good understanding of scripture. It’s a very good example of eisegesis rather than exegesis. It is full of massive contradictions. He labored mightily to acquit God of being the author of sin and failed miserably. God certainly made the “rules” we are supposed to live by, but Calvin didn’t understand how they related to the Christian life. He demonstrated that abundantly in his autocratic rule of Geneva. Calvin’s Geneva was one of the grimmest places to live in Europe.
I’ve included a couple examples of Calvin’s problems in another post, so I won’t repeat myself here. I will point you to a good survey – David Hunt’s “What Love is This?”
#3 by H.S. on 01/01/2005 - 4:26 pm
Pure silliness.
The books and work of just Moses refutes the above, then add the apostle Paul who deftly covered, by inspiration or even by derivation – from both new and already recorded statements by God. You do not believe it. You do not accept what it says – in context and applied as process principle. Few do.
Here on this porch it is a badge of honor not to be a “theologian,” so I’m sure Mr. Hunt would be an acceptable expert, but a lot of his non-basics (common to every believer) writing can be Biblically refuted easily (given only his hyper-Dispensationalism) by simply reading the Bible – all of it – in context. Facts of science or just plain grammar and composition reading skills were brought to bear against his books by decent, intelligent southern men, who had to go easy on him so as not to be seen as “piling on.” I’ve seen him in action. If I compare the behavior that Bob defines as “rude Yankee” then that would describe him as I saw him. Is he always like that? Probably not. He loves his wife and kids and dog too, I’m sure.
Bob has stood alone in a group and fought many screaming against him. So has Dave. Dave would have been one screaming at him. They are of like spiritual gift. As the topic or debate criteria changed, we would all find ourselves changing sides or leaving the room altogether because we think they’re both being silly and stupid.
But, that’s what you get when we simply don’t believe and do what the Bible plainly says, and which has been established by physical, historical and archaeological fact. If it is not the inspired (using God-breathed definition) Word of God preserved for every generation, then, of course, all “opinion” is assailable by any other “opinion” and only His mere operational physical laws constrain us to truth that we can readily observe.
God has stated a human can never understand Him without communication between that man’s spirit and His Spirit. He said that only happens at the moment in time and circumstance when His Spirit revives and regenerates and co-exists alongside that man’s spirit. Jesus, the Creator God, said that was his spirit’s being “born again” and now is at that point forward inseparable from Him. He states the spirit is competent and been assigned to drive the mental and the physical. The unjoined, unregenerated spirit will not drive the mental and the physical to the same places in the same way as His Spirit co-joined will. He said that.
Consider “worship” – now there’s a tough concept for “modern man” to wrap himself around. Good and bad. All only relative and meaningful and effective to our existence as defined by God. Here we are: the contradictions and desperation of man – struggling continually with Him.
Not here.