Open Theism

[Drew]

Solo, your attempts to carry your point by trying to smear your opponents as slow-witted fools no one (except possibly yourself). Even if were not otherwise obvious that healing involves recovery, TanNinety has provided a slam-dunk - 2 Kings 20:7 clearly and unambiguously establishes that healing and recovery are necessarily connected - the healing is made manifest by the recovery of Hezekiah.

Even if Solo's line of reasoning had any merit (which it demonstrably does not), one still would need to deal with the following declaration by the Lord in 2 Kings 20:1

"This is what the LORD says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die"

Even if "recovery" could be somehow disentangled from the act of healing, we still have this clear statement of God about Hezekiah's future - "you are going to die". If you want to try to argue that this is simply a statement that Hezekiah was going to eventually die (e.g. as an old man), be my guest. As most readers can imagine, such an argument will go nowhere.

 

[Solo]

Hezekiah was dying from an illness and was not going to recover from it.
Hezekiah prayed for a healing and God removed the illness.
Hezekiah did not recover from the illness because the illness was removed.
Until Hezekiah prayed for God's healing, he was dying from an unrecoverable illness.
Simple, but against those who are following the heresy of Open Theism, and this is the one verse of scripture that they lay their entire set of beliefs upon.
You open theists can continue to walk with your eyes closed to the truth. Good bye.

 

[Drew]

Hezekiah was dying from an illness and was not going to recover from it.
Hezekiah prayed for a healing and God removed the illness.
Hezekiah did not recover from the illness because the illness was removed.
Until Hezekiah prayed for God's healing, he was dying from an unrecoverable illness.
Simple, but against those who are following the heresy of Open Theism, and this is the one verse of scripture that they lay their entire set of beliefs upon.
You open theists can continue to walk with your eyes closed to the truth. Good bye.

Repeating an inchorent argument does not make it many more true. The above argument has been carefully and methodically countered in the last page or so of this thread - the interested reader can take 5 minutes and see that this is so. Is there anyone besides Solo who is willing to stand by the above argument?

Besides it is simply not true that the open theist case rests on this one verse. Readers: please check out previous posts in this thread and come to your own conclusions about whether the 2 Kings 20 passage is the only one that has been put forward in defence of open theism.

 

[DivineNames]

Besides it is simply not true that the open theist case rests on this one verse.

What about the striking out of names from the book of life, do you think that is possibly relevant??

There are of course verses in the N.T. which talk about God's foreknowledge, I don't know how open theists explain those. But the picture of God given in the Bible... is it really in keeping with a timeless, unchanging kind of God?

I know certain Christians would blame the influence of Neo-Platonism on Christian theology for creating what they see as an impersonal abstraction of a Deity, not the living personal God of the Bible.

 

[Packrat]

Think about an architect who you've hired to build you a house. You pay his fees and he returns to you, weeks later, with a blueprint for a proposed house design. In the blueprint, there are doors on the ceilings, ladders in the floor, and tables mounted to the walls. "What is this?", you'd complain. "Why have you so foolishly designed this house?" The architect would merely respond "No, you simply don't understand. Those features are all part of my greater plan for the house." Angry, you would reply, "I don't care about your plan. I know what I want in a house because I have experience living in houses. I have no use for your plan."

Or how about this example, Cosmo: This universe is based on the passage of time. Therefore a plan does not come to completion until it is completed. So we may see doors and windows on the floor and we say, "Those doors and windows aren't supposed to be there but in the walls. You can't do anything right. You're just an incompetent architect." When really the plan has not come to completion and those doors and windows are really not placed in the floor but on it until their time to be used comes and they are placed in the walls. If we try to put them up right now, they might just fall straight through the doorway because we don't have screws, nails, or hinges even. I think we are looking at an unfinished plan here and judging the overall plan based on this.

Oh, and Solo, you made a very good point about God not regretting, but you still have to convince me. Mind you, I haven't been looking over this thread carefully so you may have readressed the issue when you made your last post on it.