All defenses of the sovereignty of God, including the above analogy, are helpful. If anything I've said is taken as in any way diminishing to that sovereignty, I misspoke, I apologize, I repent, and I ask for your forgiveness. I admit to being clumsy in speech, and slow in articulation. I want to affirm the Five Points of Calvinism without equivocation. I don't want to be like Tiessen, fiddling with "middle knowledge" or other Arminian / Semi-Pelagian quagmires. When I said,
I suspect that this may be a legitimate concern. If traditional Calvinism holds to a timeless view of God, then it looks reasonable to me to wonder if this timelessness was imported into Christian theology from Greco-Romans, because it appears to me that the God of the pre-Christian Hebrews was, and is, a "highly relational personal being".
I admit that I was being clumsy, at best. I'll clarify, if God wills it.
I believe that (i)humanity exists in a fallen state of "total depravity" since the original sins of Adam and Eve; (ii)whomsoever God saves, He saves through "unconditional election"; (iii)Christ's atonement on the cross was "limited" to the elect, and was not for the doomed; (iv)God draws His elect to Himself through "irresistable grace"; and (v)whom God elects and justifies, He "perseveres" to the end. I believe in the Five Points of Calvinism without equivocation. So I'm a Calvinist to the extent that I believe in these five points. But I also believe that there are serious problems in the "covenant theology" that has been produced through the "analogy-of-faith" hermeneutic. If the reformation were perfect, then there would be no reason to try to build on the foundation that the reformers laid. I follow
John Piper in holding fervently to the sovereignty of God, while simultaneously taking a cafeteria approach to "dispensationalism", "covenant theology", and "new covenant theology".
My biggest living Christian heros are R.C. Sproul and John Piper. Among the other educational institutions that Piper attended was Fuller's Theological Seminary, where he became close to Daniel Fuller. I'm not familiar with Fuller's position with respect to the Five Points of Calvinism, but I know he's been critical of both the "face-value" hermeneutic used by dispensationalists and the "analogy-of-faith" hermeneutic used by covenant theologians. In his book, "The Unity of the Bible: Unfolding God's Plan for Humanity" (pp. 100-101), Fuller suggests using a different hermeneutic. Among other things, he says,
[T]o understand biblical theology we must start at the beginning, with what God did first. Then we should move on through the Bible, following its own time sequence and interpretation of God's supernatural interventions.
Unfortunately the church has seldom followed this approach in the almost two thousand years of its history. At the outset it had to deal with the thinking of the ancient Greek world, where succession in a time sequence was regarded as part of the flux of this world and therefore irrelevant to eternal, unchanging truth. Therefore to make the gospel meaningful to that culture, scriptural truths were set forth in timeless categories. This approach has continued to influence theologians such as Calvin, who in his Institutes outlined his systematic theology in categories (e.g., God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church) with no reference to time.
At least two theologians in the Western church, however, have rebelled against the timelessness in which the Bible's teaching has traditionally been summarized. In 1739 Jonathan Edwards ... set forth the outline of a different kind of theology in a series of sermons entitled "A History of the Work of Redemption." ...
Edwards hoped to be able to rework these sermons into a system of theology, but his untimely death prevented this. ...
I intend to follow Edwards's plan for writing theology
In reading the remainder of "The Unity of the Bible", I was disappointed at how superficial it seemed compared to the Bible itself, and compared to what I've read of Edwards. So I concluded that the hermeneutic that Fuller was suggesting needed some work. Among other things, I've concluded that a viable hermeneutic needs to segregate (i)things that don't change (God, God's attributes, God's eternal law and eternal covenant, God's basic relationship with His creation, including His immanence and transcendence, the Trinity, etc.) from (ii)things that do change (especially human beings, human history, human cultures and laws, etc.). Since the former category pertains to things that don't change in biblical history, a topical, timeless, analogy-of-faith approach can be taken to subjects in the first category. Since the second category pertains to things that DO change in biblical history, the kind of chronological approach suggested by Fuller is essential. The conclusions of the topical approach can be used as a control in the chronological approach. By separating the timeless from the time-bound, it's possible to use the topical as a control in the chronological without superimposing time-bound stuff from later passages onto time-bound stuff in earlier passages. I see the Five Points of Calvinism as a thoroughly reliable distillation of conclusions of such topical approach, and therefore as controls in such chronological approach.
From my admittedly flawed perspective, a hermeneutic like this might simultaneously satisfy (i)the Calvinist concern for moral free agency and compatibilism, and (ii)concerns of people like Tiessen about the "traditional Calvinist model that God is absolutely timeless". The need for "middle knowledge" and other Arminian schemes should evaporate under this hermeneutic because the schism between foreordination and "free-will" is eliminated at the outset.
