Thursday, September 10, 2015
Calvinism vs. Reformed Molinism Debate
The debate has been posted at the Seeing God Ministries website (link to page)(direct link to mp3). The debate pitted Reformed Molinists Richard Bushey and Zachary Lawson against myself and Josh Sommer.
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3 comments:
I listened to the debate last afternoon. Wow, those guys and your side, TF, are just way full of knowledge. You all were going so fast speaking your positions it was hard to keep up. I am going to listen to this debate again, the Lord willing?
What I can say is as I noted on the comment thread to the blog post, middle knowledge just doesn't work for me simply because there is no real middle knowledge. It is imaginary. One has to use their own imagination to concoct the notion and then articulate it in such a way you are bringing others into this imaginary middle knowledge concept to live life in this created world.
What sense I got especially from you TF as well as your partner was a true Biblical sense of two things. One, God's existence. And two, ours.
God's existence can best be understood by what Dr. J Sidlow Baxter asked some folks listening to him to do as he preached the Word at University Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas back in the 1980's I believe. I got the tape directly from University Baptist Church and listened to it as well as hours and hours of other wonderful messages recorded on tape from this man.
In this particular tape he asked everyone to start "thinking" into the past and think and think and think as far back and as long as you can before you can't. So I did. I encourage anyone reading this to do the same. I began thinking about God Our Heavenly Father as Eternal. And as Co-equal with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, Three Eternal beings, Holy, High and Lifted up. I began thinking about history and then I came to a time in my imagination where I couldn't go any farther thinking into the past. I began to come apart emotionally mentally because my mind just could not get a handle on eternity past.
Then after awhile Dr. Baxter asked those listening to now turn around and start thinking into Eternity in the future! AAAAH how wonderful it was and so peaceful and relaxing to think on things above, thinking about dwelling with God forever in Their Presence and Paradise, thinking about all the promises of God that are ours in Christ and what I could look forward to when I died and passed out of this flesh into Eternity!
After awhile Dr. Baxter then made this note. He said, I hope you now have discovered that we are creatures. We were created. We are created beings. When God created us He created us to think in one direction naturally and that direction is into Eternity the future. We were not and we cannot comprehend the Eternal God as He exists when thinking about Him into eternity past.
This debate underscores that for me.
These Monlinists have created a concept that simply doesn't exist outside their imaginations and therefore it is unbiblical to even reason forward using middle knowledge as any sort of guide post into the future. How this helps them and their theology, this philosophical theology is beyond me. Their knowledge is layered and layered with human imaginations of possible worlds and responses in those imaginary worlds all the while we can be and should be thinking on things above not on things of this world and the imaginations we can think up with our minds while alive in it.
It doesn't look like the site where the debate is can be reached anymore. Any where else it can be accessed?
Re-upload of the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXbvgS19Xms
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