Reformed Jiu-Jitsu

ANTHONY AQUINO SAID:

“(By the way, I'm brazilian and calvinist, sorry by my english and lack of better word selection.)”

Hi Tony!

i) Nice to see the doctrines of grace are making headway in Brazil. To a great extent the future of Christianity lies in the Southern Hemisphere. That’s where the action is.

ii) Your English is just fine. Moreover, your English is much better than my Portuguese!

Finally, if I dared to criticize your English, you might retaliate with some of that Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu. Submit me in a joint lock or blood choke!

“Some christians ask me: if God determined everything (to decree), he determined my sins, so I must commit sins and bad things (according to christianity) to follow God determined things. How can I explain this?”

i) No doubt it sounds bad, superficially speaking, to say that God predestined sin and evil. However, it also sounds bad to say that God allows sin and evil. But we live in a world with sin and evil, so God had a purpose for it.

ii) In fact, it’s better to say that everything happens for a good reason, including sin and evil, according to God’s wise plan for your life–than to say that sin and evil are pointless events with no redeeming value in the greater scheme of things.

iii) I don’t know what I “must” do until I do it.

iv) Yes, I “must” do whatever God predestined. But this doesn’t mean that I was going to do something else, something better, until God stepped in to make me do something bad.

God is like a novelist or storyteller. You and I are like characters in his story. There’s nothing in particular that you or I were going to do apart from God. In fact, there are lots of different things we could have done, in the sense that a novelist can think of many alternate endings. In one “draft,” Antonio marries the girl next door, and they live happily ever after. In another “draft,” Antonio marries a Swedish exchange student, and they divorce after five years of marriage.

When God creates the world, he makes one of these stories the real story. But it’s not as if he was preventing you from living the other story. For whatever story plays out is dependent on God anyway.

v) In addition, planned events can be the same as chance events. Take rolling the dice. Chances are that, sooner or later, you will roll a pair of sixes. Chances are that, sooner or later, you will roll a pair of sixes twice in a roll.

Of course, the same thing could happen if the dice are loaded. In that case, the dice would come up sixes every time. But this means there are occasions when a random outcome is the same as a predetermined outcome. There are times when cheating and getting lucky are indistinguishable.

It isn’t obvious to me why it is wrong for God to predestine an event as long as there is a possible world in which the same event happens by chance.