Happy Predestination Sunday
If you’re among the elect and you know it, clap your hands. 👏🏻 👏🏻
Hearing today that Predestination = God’s sovereignty + human free will. As long as we’re tuned in closely enough to choose what God wants. Because the process is predestined too, and we need to stick with The Plan.
LOL
Hearing today that Predestination = God’s sovereignty + human free will. As long as we’re tuned in closely enough to choose what God wants. Because the process is predestined too, and we need to stick with The Plan.
LOL
Comments
Sigh.
I hesitate to inquire where this was “preached.”
I attended an Anglican service today, and Romans 8: 26 - 39 was one of the readings. Google indicates that this passage is the basis for "Predestination Sunday". Though I don't think that was the precise topic of the homily, but rather Jesus' mustard seed analogy.
But also knowing @The_Riv works in an RC church, I’m wondering if that’s where he heard these nuggets of wisdom. Because it doesn’t sound like what I’d expect to hear in an RC church.
(That said, it doesn’t sound like what I’d expect to hear in a Presbyterian church either.)
My guess, in the absence of further clarification from @The_Riv, is that this might be a sardonic in-joke among theologically savvy non-Calvinists whenever this particular Sunday rolls around, with the term "Predestination Sunday" meant to parody standard liturgical nomenclature like "Holy Thursday".
I’m also slightly confused that in the case of at least part of the message I heard today, human free will is largely if not completely thrown out of the window. Maybe I misheard, but I don’t think so.
Makes me want to continue to distance myself from Paul. The red letters are enough for anyone, IMO.
Thanks for helping out with the genealogy. But what would you say was the intended meaning of the person you heard using the phrase? Like at set-up someone says matterafactly...
Or more like...
I think Paul is worth studying more as an historical architect of church power(far from regressive in his overall influence), and less as a direct guide on how to live your everyday life.
Reading the passage, it can probably be read as saying not much more than whatever is implied by the God Of The Philosophers model, and probably stays on the non-deranged side(ie. the "No" side) of the "Can you accept Christ as your saviour and live an almost totally good life but still be damned to the tortures of Hell because of a decision God made before you were born?" debate.
Paul wrote this passage to comfort suffering Christians with the assurance that God's saving purpose for them is solid, unshakable and rooted in God's initiative rather than human performance.
Time to stop picking on @Nick Tamen I think he also accepts the above statement.
Where do you see people picking on @Nick Tamen here? Do you mean on some other calvinist-themed threads?
That said, while Paul wrote some things I wrestle with (and some things where I have a feeling we’ve missed his point completely, which given his style of writing may be understandable), Paul also wrote much that I can’t imagine wanting to ignore and shunt to the side. (And yes, I would put Romans 8—nothing can separate us from the love of God made known in Christ Jesus—in that category.)
It went well - two requests for a copy afterwards, one from the vicar!
At the very least, in all the places where you'd expect him to mention people going to Hell he doesn't.
Golly, approbation indeed! Our beloved Fr Paul preached on Rom 8 yesterday, and very well too. This passage is, he said, the pivot of the whole letter, after which Paul wrestles with the implications of it all. But no mention of predestination, thank heavens! It got me going back to Romans (what did it do for me, I wonder?) for the first time since reading Watchman Nee's 'Normal Christian Life' all those years ago at college. Wow!
I'll get me coat ...
Glibly and without wishing to cause offence. If we want to make peace to some extent with the Apostle Paul, swap lenses.
Change the prescription.
Read him through Orthodox specs.
😉
I perceive with regret that I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram."
Well, for the record, you're not the first wag to think of it. I found a WordPress blog from 2011 expressing confusion about the phrase "Trinity Sunday", and jocularly wondering "Is next Sunday 'Predestination Sunday'?"
So, along with you and the woman at chez Lambchopped, that's three people who independently of one another all either coined or heard the phrase.
FWIW, this thread is now right at the top of the page when you google "Predestination Sunday", and AI seems to have forgotten the phrase.
Yes, Lewis says that Paul is the one whose writings can be taken to suggest that, while all the really terrifying messages about Hell come from Jesus. (I personally wish I could be a universalist, and I would love to discover, once I pass away, that I have been wrong and that universalism is true.)
It's my only hope. Otherwise my eternity is tinged with sadness wherever my destination. If the exclusivists are right, quadruply so.
I think it's a common stage in deconstruction.
There's an underlying assumption in protestant theology at least (not so sure about other traditions) that every human being ever born actually deserves eternal torment and so anyone who escapes it should thank God for that and everyone who doesn't can't complain because they deserve Hell. Unfortunately I find that actually living life and meeting actual humans that underlying assumption just doesn't hold water.
Whenever something terrible happens to someone we instinctively say "no-one deserves that!" and yet traditional protestant theology says "they deserve worse". Someone falls into a volcano and dies in lava and according to that theology when the lava finishes killing them they'll be in an even worse place. For ever.
That is not a God of Love or of Justice.
I dunno, but I'm pretty sure the assumption underlay Calvin and Luther's theology. I'm all ears for alternatives.
It feels implicit in the word "saved". Saved from what? If it's from Hell, then why would you have been going there if you didn't deserve it?
Jesus never said he came to save people from Hell. He did, however, say that he came so that people might have abundant and everlasting life.
So, we're saved not from eternal torment, but from eternal non-existence? That's pretty much the Jehovahs Witness view, except that for most of the saved, the eternal existence is lived out on Earth, rather than a heavenly realm.
I've often thought of Roman Catholicism as being obsessed with hell fire and eternal damnation, probably from the blood-curdling Jesuit sermon in Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.
When I meet RCs in real life or encounter them here aboard Ship, I find that's not generally the case.
Yes there is. Atheism.
Citation required ...