Originally posted by Hornet
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If it would be unjust or tyrannical to punish Southerners living in 2018 for what happened between 1861 and 1865, how is it any less unjust of God to punish the descendants of Adam for his sin, in which they had no part ? It is useless to be Almighty, if one is not equally Good. An Almighty God who is not Infinite in Goodness, is not God. If God is Unrighteous, He is not worthy of worship. For if God is less good, less righteous, less equitable than His creatures, then something is very wrong with one’s doctrine of God. God must be better, by far, than His creatures, or He is no God in any sense worth discussing.
That is why Romans 9 is unconvincing. St Paul resorts to bluster and browbeating - both fallacious proceedings - when he says, “Nay, but who art thou, O man, that answerest against God ?”.
The answer might be something like:
“Someone who is not impressed by your fallacious “arguments”, who would like very much to know why it is fine for the God you preach to act in a way that seems grotesquely unfair. You cannot, if you want to make a consistent (and persuasive !) argument, apply one ethical standard to what God does in choosing Esau and Jacob, while also making a big fuss about human unrighteousness; as you do earlier in Romans. If you are to be taken seriously when indicting mankind for unrighteousness in Romans 1-3, you cannot airily dismiss the seeming unrighteousness of God in hating Esau before he was even born. You have to apply the same ethical standard to God as to man, otherwise calling God righteous loses all meaning, and you might as well call Him a four-sided triangle, for all the sense that calling such a God righteous makes. For if God’s Righteousness looks like what human beings call unrighteousness, then one of the following must be true:
1. Human words applied to God can mean anything.
2. Human words applied to God have no meaning.
3. God is unknowable.
4. God is a hypocrite.
5. God is beyond good and evil.
6. God plays with people like a cat with a mouse.
7. God is changeable.
8. God is evil.
9. Thinking about God and man is a meaningless waste of time, a “chasing of the wind”.
What’s more, in Romans 9, you make an argument for what you believe. But that being so, you have no right to object when someone finds your argument unpersuasive, and says so. If you make your argument, you cannot with any justice or consistency object when a counter-argument is made by people who reject your premises, your reasoning, or your conclusions. You are not the only person capable of reasoning, and as you employ reason to set forth your case, those who are not persuaded by what you say cannot be browbeaten into silence by you, but have every right to reason in favour of their case, as you do in favour of yours.
Sorry, Paul, but your argument in Romans 9 is unpersuasive. You make some good points, but weaken what you say by trying to switch off the use of reason when it causes difficulties for your argument. Reason is either a trustworthy means for exploring predestination, or it is not - you cannot have it both ways. If your position is, that reason is useful for exploring it, but only up to a point, and no further, that is an intelligible position; all you need do, is explain that this is your position. But what you cannot do, is resort to browbeating people so they don’t ask awkward questions - for you to do that, only awakes the suspicion that your position will not bear close examination. Which is self-defeating behaviour.”
Unless there is some kind of “family likeness” between what is Righteousness in God, and what man means by that concept and word, then for all we know the word “Righteousness”, as applied to God, may (unbeknownst to us) mean that God is unrighteous, or something else, or nothing at all. It is pointless to ascribe attributes to God, if there is no knowable relation between what the name of the attribute signifies as applied to God, and what the same word signifies when used in human affairs. There may be only a very distant echo of God’s Righteousness in righteousness as named among men; but if righteousness in man bears not even the most distant likeness to the Righteous God, it is confusing and mischievous to ascribe the same named quality to God & man alike. A circle drawn by the hand of an expert draughtsman may be far more truly circular than the circle drawn by a three-year old child whose is guided by its mother; but there is not no likeness of the child’s circle to the draughtsman’s - the likeness may be faint, but a likeness there must be, and it must be knowable; otherwise, it is misleading to call both circles a circle. If Righteousness in God is what among men would be called unfairness, it is pointless to say God is Righteous.
God cannot be less Righteous than an upright man. So Righteousness in God must be better, truer, fuller, more adequately and satisfyingly Righteously Righteous than righteousness in man. So something is wrong, when an argument seeking to vindicate God’s Righteousness instead makes God seem to be tyrannical and unrighteous, or else unintelligible. A Divine revelation of God’s Righteousness that makes His Righteousness seem meaningless, unrighteous, or purely baffling, is not revelatory.
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