Meelhama agrees, to a limited extent:
Of course everything you wrote makes complete sense; but only if one accepts your categories.
1) You conflate Calvinism and Hyper-Calvinism.
2) More seriously, you conflate immanent and transcendent categories.
3) If theology Reformed to the Augustinian—and ostensibly—the Hebraic tradition is “not only psychologically nonsensical but bordering on the unbearably silly,” you just do not yet understand. Don’t quickly discount the very tradition that allows your own semi-pelagian evangelicalism.
4) Hermeneutics, like morality, is not a question of counting noses. Or, in this case, verses.
This is why I pay little attention to theologians. They are as unintelligible to the normal educated man, and as useless, as the post-modern academics. Dixiedog and a few others have made the mistake of attempting to shoehorn omniderigence into one of the theologians’ pre-established, oft-debated categories (is it Calvinism or Hyper-Calvinism?), not understanding that it does not describe a highly refined intellectual position but an actual belief that is held by ordinary people. Indeed, there are millions more people that subscribe to the idea of an omniderigent deity than have ever encountered the word “hermeneutics”.
Using high theology to describe common Christian beliefs about God is similar to evaluating precisely which brand of socialism the guy who just hates the rich and wants to stick it to them subscribes. It’s not merely impossible, it’s beside the point. The vanities of the theologians notwithstanding, not all considerations have been foreseen and sufficiently thought through, indeed, I’m nearly as often surprised by the shallowness of the thinkers who have supposedly settled great questions as I am by their wisdom.
My senior year of high school, a girl from our class rolled her car and was killed. Much was said about God’s Will and His wonderful, if rather short, plan for her life and so forth, but I was quite skeptical. Whereas others sought for a reason why she had died, I thought the answer was sitting right there in front of our faces. The laws of physics were in place, the girl liked to go fast – she was one of the better racers on the ski team – and the confluence of those two things plus the lack of a seatbelt and a tight curve of the road equaled one dead driver. QED.
Sure, it is eminently possible that an omniderigent God had intentionally splattered her brains solely for His ineffable glory, but that not only holds some rather disturbing implications, it is also completely unnecessary. The number of variables that go into every single event that occurs indicates that either we and everything else are complete automata or God allows a lot more freedom than most people either understand or want to believe.
There are at least two ways to program artificial intelligence of which I am aware. The traditional method is to attempt to construct rules for every possible situation. This works very well for simple actions and small numbers, but works less and less well as complexity increases. The organic method involves creating a few simple rules, then leaving the entities alone and watching their behavior evolve. Keep the good ones and weed out the undesirable; from the perspective of the AIs, it is supernatural selection. At any time, the programmer can step in and make sweeping or small changes, but for the most part, he simply watches as things progress towards the desired state.
Christians know God has a plan for humanity, of course, what we are debating here is the way in which that plan is put into effect. Omniderigistes believe that every little interaction is pre-programmed, (or perhaps managed live in the case of the exotemporal school), my own belief is that God, the Great Programmer, generally leaves Creation in our created hands, acting only when it is necessary for the operation of his plan or when we ask him to. To quote MC Hammer, “that’s why we pray”. You can call it vologence, I suppose, if you must.
This may strike some as a lowbrow argument, (would that make me a vole prole?), but I see hermeneutic debate being to the Christian what academic debate is to the engineer. It is entertaining, but irrelevant to the quotidian existence no matter what import its practitioners place upon it. Such discussions concern me no more than the storied debates concerning angels and pins.
PS – Words fail to express my disgust with you fraudulent philistines. 300+ comments and not one recognized a reference to higher Truth and Beauty? The correct response was either “what is the secret of your power” although I would have also accepted “you take the high road, I’ll take the low”. Where is that White Buffalo when you need him?