Friday, July 19, 2013

sovereignty

Consider the notion of sovereignty in its fullness. It means all powerful and all knowing. Simply being in a position and having an ' eternity' that is beyond our comprehension. I like the way how the Calvinist portrays eternity as something the limited human mind cannot understand for its meaning and the power that comes behind that word is something that is outside this dimension of understanding. If you think you can understand the ties between sovereignty and eternity, consider this few notions alongside the issue of freewill.
With sovereignty comes the notion of predestination. If a being is sovereign over another, it has all rights to write law, decide on what others should do, even lay it out for them. In that sense, the government only has temporal sovereignty because its power stops at law creation. It cannot pre-determine what you can do. Whereas an all sovereign being in all its rights can. Look at the law on family. A parent determines the direction a child goes. By law it is correct, and morally acceptable. The child cannot by law or morally decide on his own before the coming of age, what is his purpose or obtain ownership over anything including himself. Now, that is only a minute sense of sovereignty. Real sovereignty can be scary to picture, but yet beautiful as well. God is all sovereign.
So what is predestination? Predestination is the idea of predetermination. That our lives are being predetermined by this sovereign being. Get the drift how did this came about alongside sovereignty? Now consider this notion together with freewill. We all know every humans has freewill because it is in build in us the ability to think for ourselves and make decisions.
unless you are a person who denies God ever having a form of sovereignty, consider this notion. Each one of us has special things that we are good at or other things that we are bad at. This in its way is already a subtle way to say we have a predetermined purpose or plan because by using those peculiar gifts, only then do you reach full potential. But at the same time, by saying that all people are good at some things and bad at others, it is already saying that we have no freewill of being able to chose some things in our lives. We cannot decide what we are talented at. That already is predetermination which comes from the ideology of predestination.
Consider this too. The notion of  'the right partner'. That too is predetermination. It is the belief that somewhere in this world lies the 1 and only 1 for you. and that is saying that there is a predetermined future, person, some people even say gift. With this, you can say it is not possible to marry the wrong one. But at the same time, I then ask you, is Love an option of choice? For in the same way we can decide to persue a career, study a peculiar vocation, we can start and end a relationship. At the same time, predestination would deny 1 thing that a lot of us will find it hard to believe, though we all would love to. Getting married to the wrong person is not possible because your future has already been predetermined.
The final issue I will dwell on is completeness of predestination. Some people will argue that only for certain aspects of life is predestination applicable. There is always an intersection where freewill and predestination must meet and one must give way to the other. I do not reject the premises of arguments of any side, but which conclusion i accept is a different story. Consider this, we have talked about what sovereignty is earlier at the top, so here is my short argument.
For a being to remain sovereign unchanged, power cannot be removed because once removed, sovereignty is gone. Now, the notion of granting freewill indefinitely means there are issues that God himself even, cannot determine. Those issues now becomes indefinite. At the same time, the eternity of God does not justifies that there are anything that is not known to him, justifying predestination. Thus my personal conclusion, I fully condone to the theology that God is all sovereign, thus predetermining all things and knowing all things. How freewill fits into the equation.... I have yet to find a justification. hahaha. My take? Grace.

No comments:

Post a Comment