If it bugs you that I said God was alone, then let me change my words: There was a time when the Father, Son, & Holy Spirit existed alone. Upon God's act of creation, this ceased to be the case. That's a before-and-after state of affairs. Do you think that we have always co-existed with God from His perspective? If not, then you also believe that God has experienced a before-and-after.
That's definitely an improvement, but it's still not wholly accurate.
God has always existed inherently in-relationship. God did not create in order to have relationship, and He did not create because he had to have relationship, or in any way something He was "previously" missing. In point of (logical) fact, it could be argued God created because He already existed inherently in relationship. To say the three were alone is self-contradictory. If there were three of them, then the "they" is an indication of not-aloneness.
But more importantly there's the problem of time again. Your posts uses the phrase, "before-and-after," but that is completely incorrect. There is no "before" before the before-and-after!
I know. It kinda fries the head a little
. Just think it through
.
Think of time like direction. If you were floating around in the middle of outer space there would be no "up," "down," "left," right," "north," "south," "east," "west," or any other direction, nor any labels for them. You'd need a fixed point of reference. If I said, "
The star in front of you is our reference point. Move to the left of the star." That would have meaning, and that reference point would give meaning to the words, as well as purpose and measure to your actions. Now, alternatively, consider YOU are the star in front of you and I say. "
Move to the left of the star." You cannot move to the left of yourself.
God cannot exist prior to His existence. He cannot move to the left (or right) of Himself. He is the I Am. There is no "before" He makes a before. He is the Uncaused Cause and cause is one of the many things the Uncause Cause caused. There's no cause before that cause. God's "experience of before-and-after" does not occur WITHIN the before and after, but external to it, aside from it, and unaffected by it.
Furthermore, This entire conversation -
including my post - is all misguided and incomplete because the larger truth of the matter is that time is a function of gravity, or what we now call "singularity." Matter and energy are interchangeable, time and space are functions of gravity and neither are linear. Under certain conditions the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line! On the quantum level it is possible to be two places at once or for two objects to simultaneously occupy identical space.
Humans living in THIS time and space cannot do any of that.
To say "God can do any of that" is misguided because God does not "do" time, space, matter, energy, or any of it. God
IS. It's not even wholly accurate to say, "
God does cause and effect," because the more accurate statement would be something like "
God caused the cause and everything else is."
We experience it as a passage of time, a sequence of events that are measured by what for us is a complex chain of causes and effects. God
IS. He does not stop being being when He looks into, or "steps" into creation, observing and experiencing our version of things. He doesn't stop being
is. God is the pentultimate existentialist
! Always everywhere ever present in the Now that is Him. He is thte aforementioned "star" to which He is left, right, up, down, above, and below Himself.
And this is why Molinism is wrong.
It assumes temporal conditions are relevant to the Uncaused Cause. It assumes - presuppositionally - there is a "before" for the Cause simply because the first before-and-after was caused. In other words, Molinism's presupposition(s) is wrong.
It's understandable. Molina did not have a clue. He did not fathom a fraction of what we now know about time and space and what we in the 21st century think we know is likely to be a laughable smidgen of reality, of what God knows.
God knows everything that is logically possible to knowable and it is not even accurate to say, "He knows it all at once," because the concept of "once" is irrelevant to His knowledge, and not applicable to His existence. The term "once" is an idication of a point along some "timeline," or a single point in and endless series of causes and effects. There's no "once" for a Guy who "sees" and "experiences" everything all at once without reference to up, down, before or after.
Yes.
Paul doesn't seem to indicate that this is up in the air. For that matter, the Bible is full of examples of God going out of His way to make sure humans don't mess up His plans. That verse in 1 Cor. 2:8 is just one explicit example. The wisdom of God had to remain hidden so that the rulers of this world would crucify Christ.
All of which are spoken about conditions INSIDE of creation..... using anthropomorphic language the creature can understand. If God were to say, "Gleer snabbin florzfon bueble dyoqa tevpic" we wouldn't have a clue what He meant even though He and He alone is the Creator. Twenty centuries from now that gibberish I just typed might actually be actual words with actual definitions containing meaningful information about time, space, cause, effect, anf God's knowledge thereof. God did not speak in an unknown language, though. He spoke in words His creatures could understand, even if they did not fathom the whole meaning of all His words.
The wisdom of God had to remain hidden so that the rulers of this world would crucify Christ.
Nope. Our Molinist brothers are reading a causal relationship into that verse that is not actually stated in the verse AND AS i HAVE ALREADY STATED, they do so in direct contradiction to 1 Peter 1:20 AND the ontological nature of Christ. In other words, it is a very selective use of a single verse. They remove it from the context of whole scripture and give it a meaning, a
possibility, that does not exist once the determinism of Christ is accepted.
If Jesus
IS God (and we Trinitarians all agree that he is God), then there has never been a moment anywhere at any time in all of creation when he was no God. Never a time, or a place, when he was not the Son (even though the "Son" is a New Testament soteriological term), and never not THE Son. There was also...... never a time or place when he was not the resurrection. Before the resurrection..... He "was" the resurrection. Or... more accurately, before the resurrection he IS the resurrection.
That is, after all, exactly what he stated.
Did not have quite the same meaning when he spoke those words in Israel during the first century after his incarnation in creation. But now that we understand time better, we understand his words to be existential and ontological in ways neither Caiaphas nor Molina could fathom. Jesus has always been the resurrection. Before creation was created, before a single atom was ever spoken into existence, before a single human cell was formed by God's life-giving breath changing dirt into a human, before a single sin had ever been created Jesus was foreknown as the perfect, blemish-free sacrifice by which we would be resurrected AND resurrected incorruptible and immortal. None of it is a contingency. None of it is a probability.
So when Molinists predicate Calvary on God withholding His knowledge lest the (sinful) creature not murder Jesus they are reading scripture in a manner contradictory to other facts of scripture. Calvary was
inevitable. Calvary is the fulcrum of human history. There's no "
Let's no kill him now that we have more knowledge."
What if the crucifixion was ordained but not the means of achieving it?
Well.... what does scripture say?
I ask because according to scripture his means of death (hanging cursedly on a tree) was foretold before anyone in the first century was born. We might even say the fruit hanging on the tree of life (eternal life) goes all the way back to Eden. If we leverage or apply the matter of "mercy" to Calvary then Romans 9 informs is in no uncertain terms God has mercy on whomever He has mercy and it most definitely unequivocally does NOT depend in any way shape or form on the will or the work of the creature. There are many ways elsewhere in scripture by which we understand the means of death were decided upon long before they killed him and long before Paul wrote about it. It was foreknown before a before existed.
Couldn't God have worked with what He was given (in terms of the myriad of free will choices His creatures would make) in bringing about Christ's crucifixion according to prophecy? I don't see any reason to think He couldn't.
Hypotheticals? We're now basing sound Christian thought, doctrine, and practice on hypotheticals, probabilities, and the selective use of single verses?
What God could have done is infinite.
That's why Molina gave consideration to his idea, the possibility of "middle knowledge." But what God could have done never conflicts with 1) what God did actually do, 2) what He says He knew "before" He created the creation in which it would happen, and what He prophetically stated about it before it happened in creation.
It's brain-bending, but it's not impossible to fathom once the presuppositions are corrected.