If you are going to read the book, the chapter about “dimensions of time” is called “It’s About Time” and the chapter on freewill is called “Freewill vs. God’s Soverignty”.

Franklin Whittenburg
http://www.cheistiannewbirth.com

Thank you so much for your words of support! I will definitely download your book and read it right now.

Once you have a rudimentary understanding how dimensionality works, it really is amazingly easy to see how such things as predestination and free will do not have to conflict!

Blessings,

Chris

The Lord gave me a revelation on alternant dimensions of time back in 1998. How time in another dimension might not be experienced sequencially, but simultaneously. When John was “caught away in the Spirit” in Revelation 4:1,2, he was shown the things “which shall be hereafter” (i.e. future). For John to be taken “somewhere” and shown the future and then returned and wrote about what he saw, means that the future would have to existed “somewhere” already (possibly in another dimension) for him to be taken there and shown it and returned and wrote about what he saw.
I wrote about this in detail in a chapter in my ebook (When Fatith Came copyright 1998-2006 Franklin Whittenburg) (PDF.format) which can be downloaded for free at my website http://www.christiannewbirth.com.
I also wrote a chapter in the same book about how freewill and predestination could exist simultaneously. I started to call the chapter “Two ways to Ninevah”. In the story, God’s will was for Jonah to go to Ninevah to preach, but Jonah exercised “freewill” and went the other way. God sent a storm and a big fish to swallow Jonah and spit him out on the shores of Ninevah. He then went and preach, just how God had planned. There are two ways to Ninevah, you can ride in the boat or in the belly of a fish! You may have freedom to make choices in your life, but God as the Creator is in control of the circumstances around your choices…….

“But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive (Genesis 50:20 KJV)”.

Franklin Whittenburg
http://www.christiannewbirth.com

a) say/suppose things not said/supposed; and

b) they ignored the basis of my thesis of the non-contradictory nature between free will and predestination, that being the “box” we place God in is the one made of uni-dimensional, uni-directional time…

As for misrepresenting Calvinism, I know a good number of Calvinists who have argued about the things mentioned in that paragraph. Additionally, I was not trying to write a doctoral thesis, but a paper using common terminology, as much as possible, so it is obvious that I could not be as complete as the subject would require for a thorough discussion on the issue…

Have you seen this piece over at Triablogue ?:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/12/pachyderm-theology.html

Jim,

The “it isn’t surprising” comment was directed to your reputation as defense of Calvinism as if it were contending for the faith.

First off, I would note that I said that the bases for these different views (particularly free will vs. predestination – which, no matter how you slice it was developed from Greek fatalism – and the logical inconsistencies around prayer and God changing His mind) do not have to be contradictory if you remove 1-dimensional, unidirectional time from the equation.

I’m not sure why this is “postmodern”, since it predates the rise of PM thought by more than a century, and I can’t claim it as my original work.

Just to delve briefly into the nature of time and string theory – If God exists beyond time and space – i.e. apart from His creation (and I believe that he does, and that there is scriptural evidence of such) – then time does not work the same for Him (as implied in His very name). As such, when we use words like “predestined” and extrapolate this concept – as we understand it – we are placing God within the sphere of time.

However, if you can grasp the concept of 3-dimensional time (and not many folks can – it escapes my understanding very quickly, though I know physicists who can grasp the concept better than I can), “predestination” no longer holds the same meaning. If God can move forward and backward at will, along with moving from side to side in time, then there are a myriad of potential pasts and futures. However, we know from scripture that there are certain things (X) that God predestines (like giving Hezekiah 15 more years of life). When He does this in 3D-time-space, it is basically like He is closing off all potential futures in which X doesn’t happen. However, this still leaves room for man’s free will (the limited futures within the bounds of God’s will).

But wait – does that mean that God does not know what man will do? Not in 3D-time-space, because He knows all of the futures, because He can see all of them. But what happens when the future becomes the past? If God sits beyond time and space, then even the past does not have to be static (to Him), even if we perceive it to be so.

If you have a basic grasp of quantum physics, then it should be obvious that using words like “predestination” in relation to God and then trying to apply our limited working knowledge of time (one-dimensional, one-way) to that same definition is like trying to explain how to stop a 3-dimensional soccer ball with the goalie bar in Pong.

Additionally, when you remove our limited box of “time” from God, the manifestation of Jesus – God in human form, limited in dimensions and time – and his relationship to God, including his praying in the garden for God to change His mind, begins to make sense, as well, without having to apply limited logic of free will or predestination to the equation.

In a nutshell – if you remove the one-dimensionality of time from the equation, then there is not a contradiction of free will and predestination, because they are literally two aspects of the same phenomena.

How can I have certainty that none of the systematized views of God in relation to time is true to the exclusion of others? There, I would go to the Bible. There are examples of places where God has predestined things (like with Hezekiah), and there are examples of places where God makes it apparent that people must make a free-will choice (like with Esther). There are also places where men choose to go against God’s will, but end up being forced in that direction anyway (like Jonah). When any of these views (all of which are man-made extrapolations as to the nature of God) are taken to the extreme, then they have to come up with contortionist reasoning to explain away contradictory passages in scripture. On the other hand, if you accept that each view contains a part of the truth because of the nature (or super-nature, to be accurate) of God, then you are not stuck trying to make less-than-convincing eisegeses of scripture.

In practice, though, one should live like you have free will to choose – how would you know the difference? One should act like God knows everything that you do and think – in view and in secret – because He does. One should pray like your petitions matter to God and that, like with Hezekiah and Moses, He might have mercy and change His mind – because we have these examples in the Bible. Trying to separate “true” Christians from “false” ones based on a dominant view of systematic theology is unscriptural and does not edify the body of Christ.

As to “another gospel”, I thought I specified that it was when – in word or practice – that a man-made system is held higher than scripture that it becomes “another gospel”. Mike Ratliff’s comment that “There are two views concerning the Gospel of Jesus Christ. First, there is what we call Calvinism. Then, there are varying degrees of unbelief” (the entire quote from his blog, BtW) would be an example of such elevation. Additionally, and I have only seen a broader contextual quote of Spurgeon’s comment that “Calvinism is the gospel” once – and multiple Calvinists who have quoted these words – and in both cases, the implication was that the Calvinist “system”, which ties multiple concepts together (some biblical, some extrapolational), was the only acceptable gospel. When this is the case, then it is, indeed, “another gospel”.

As for the passages you cite, some of them (though not John 6) indicate some level of predestination. When you suggest that they are the ONLY way of examining time in relation to God, you have just built an extrabiblical “system”, which might be helpful in explanation, but which also will have its limitations (like Newtonian Physics has its limitations when you get to micro- and macro-scale).

Thank you for your observations.

I think that folks like Nathan White have taken Jude 3’s “contention for the faith” and extrapolated it to “contention for systematic theology” (in this case, Calvinism). Not being able to see the difference is a sticky wicket, indeed…

I feel bad that Mr. White, I think, missed the point entirely of what you were saying.

When I first came outside of my little group of fellowship, and lack of outside influences (systematic theologies, church histories, etc), in order to see what other Christians interacted like and believed, and what Church history was like, I found my theology more leaning towards what I found out was the “Calvinist” side of things, although I thought Limited Atonement was really stupid, and the ‘excuses’ on many verses refuting it were quite lame as well. This made me instantly go, “oh..well…I don’t want to be named after some dead guy..”. So I reinvestigated for a long time.

What I found out was that “systematic theologies’ really stink for explaining God fully. And always have apparent contradictions with certain parts of Scripture. No matter how good the theology, there’s always one or two parts of Scripture that will make you doubt the theology is fully true. We’ll make up excuses for it, but it’s still there, nagging us.

So that made me think exactly what you did Chris, that we’re blind men groping at an Elephant. Except that the Elephant is 9 Billion times larger than a regular one.

Basically, at this point, I’m leaning more like you do, and what you wrote in that post.

Joe

Ever.