Thursday, January 16, 2014

Suboptimal grace


Now here is the question: If God can make sure everybody has at least some real opportunity to be saved, why could he not make sure that everyone has optimal grace?  Does he lack the creativity, the wisdom, or the means to do this?  And more importantly, if he could do this, is it not the case that he would do so?   Why would he not? 

http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/hell-series-ask-a-traditionalist-1-response-walls

To which a friend of mine responded:

Does God "lack the creativity, the wisdom, or the means" to avoid creating people he knows will reject him and go to hell, even with postmortem optimal grace offered to him? 
How can Walls's answer to that question be anything but, "Yes, he lacks the ability. Specifically, God doesn't have the ability to know this stuff ahead of time." Unless he goes the open theism route, isn't God a 'moral monster' for creating people whom he knows will reject him, when he didn't have to do this? 
And then once he rejects infallible foreknowledge, wouldn't he have to reject probability knowledge as well? Would God create people for whom he knew it would be very likely they would reject him, despite postmortem optimal grace? What's loving in subjecting multitudes of creatures to such risk? 
For God to be perfectly loving, he can only create people about whom he believes it is very probable that they would accept him. If God is loving, then hell must only be filled with people who truly surprised God. It's the place that secures the divine "Whoops, didn't see that coming!" The divine "Wow, that's incredible!" 
Is this portrait of God seriously preferable to the orthodox tradition?

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