Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Who can see them?

Edwards argues from pages 111-148 that God's certain foreknowledge makes impossible the notion that the wills of moral agents are contingent events or not connected with anything foregoing.

There is a great summary of the above section on pp. 144-145 and again on p. 147. I quoted this section in our worship folder last Sunday as an expository help for our public reading of Luke 6 where in v. 8 we read that Christ "knew their thoughts." I found that Edwards's last quotation in Latin is from Boethius. This section is theologically glorious:

There is no event, past, present, or to come, that God is ever uncertain of; he never is, never was, and never will be without infallible knowledge of it; he always sees the existence of it to be certain and infallible. And as he always sees things just as they are in truth, hence there never is a possibility that they may not exist . . . For if the known event should fail of existence, and not come into being, as God expected, then God would see it, and so would change his mind, and see his former mistake; and thus there would be a change and succession in his knowledge. But as God is immutable [unchangeable], and so it is utterly infinitely impossible that his view should be changed; so it is, for the same reason, just so impossible that the foreknown event should not exist; and that is to be impossible in the highest degree: and therefore the contrary is necessary. Nothing is more impossible than that the immutable God should be changed by the succession of time; who comprehends all things, from eternity to eternity, in one most perfect and unalterable view; so that his whole eternal duration is vita interminabilis, tota, simul, et perfecta possessio [a life, without beginning or end, or succession, and of the most perfect kind].”

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