My impression of the whole grace vs works thing (since both arguments appear in the scriptures) seems to be that it's an unnecessary human binary equation that popped up in the attempt to rationalize God. If you force things into a binary, then you get rigid arguments that don't address all the issues.
The whole grace argument is that, if people are given the option of "true choice," then God is no longer sovereign and people theoretically can choose to follow God and be good people. If someone is capable of making 100% good choices, they don't need Jesus. But the Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory. In fact, the Bible's promotion of the "fallen nature of man" means that people are tainted and that without God, they cannot be purified. God also cannot bear to be in the presence of sin, based on the old example of the Tabernacle (where those who were in God's presence or touched the ark would die), so therefore there is no way to be with God if you are fallen. Mankind needs to be saved = grace is mandatory.
But then, if that's the case, choice doesn't even really seem to matter much. God loves Jacob and hates Esau; God is picking and has predestinied his children for salvation. The deck is stacked; did you draw a long straw or a short one? Which would seem like a crap deal from a God who is supposedly all-loving, that He would damn any of his children/creation to eternal suffering. The Grace vs Works dichotomy (that either God chooses all those who will be saved and excludes others, vs people can "earn their way to God") makes no sense.
When paradoxes like this arise, the first question I ask is, "Is the binary pair here even accurate?" The contradiction likely comes in the cases themselves and needing to make each case so extreme, either/or in their foundations.
While it's still an assumption on my part, I can't understand relevance of a human life that DOESN'T mirror to some degree any potential "eternal life") (if one exists) and eternal significance. If such a thing does exist, and what you do in this life is relevant on the face of eternity, then shouldn't the principles here in this life reflect the eternal principles "god" would seek to foster?
So then I go back to various types of relationships I experience as a human. (Relationship with parents, relationship with children, relationship with lover, etc.) Obviously all have some degree of flaw in them because people are neither omniscient or omnipotent, but there should still be experiences and principles there that should be useful to parse what a relationship with a RELEVANT divinity should resemble.
It's not really a choice though is it? If I choose not to follow it doesn't stop there. I will forever be pestered into changing my mind or face spending the rest of eternity in hell.
Well, technically, it is a choice. (ha) But it's more like the kind of choice where the bad guy in the movie says, "Give me what I want, and I'll set you up; or you'll pay for defying me." One answer is loaded (serve me and be blessed, or deny me and suffer for eternity). There's obviously a "preferred" answer, and no real benefit choosing the other except to preserve one's integrity as a free agent. People, though, will often feel a compulsion to choose the latter; it's interesting how much human beings despise coercion levied against themselves.
God doesn't love you, He loves Himself and that which He makes like Himself. If He could see you He'd wish you dead as you're abominable to Him, thankfully(?) when He looks at you He's arranged means so that He can see Christ instead. He doesn't love any will or traits that originated in yourself, that which you could distinctly call "me" as opposed to "God." There is no such thing as love in this worldview, outside God's own self-love.
Nice distinction.
Yes, I remember reading it that way too at times. While people claim to have found a "personal God," the very way in the theology that he relates is the impersonal, at least according to salvation -- he sees Jesus, not you, when he looks at you.
Although I guess one can argue that applies just to "sin." When he looks at your "sin," he either sees the equivalent of the Passover blood masking your corruption or he just sees any darkness in you. Can we separate our "moral choices" from who we actually are, though? Don't our choices of priority matter in terms of our individualization?
To drift sideways a bit, this is the deal also with the whole "personal relationship with God" thing so highly touted today in Western culture. The whole theology is impersonal, but the relationship is supposedly personal? I wonder sometimes if it just seems personal because it's all viewed from the internal world of the human being rather than from "God's" perspective or from an external perspective; of course it feels personal, because people of faith automatically personalize their beliefs! They are the ones finding personal meaning in it. It doesn't mean the relationship is fundamentally personal, the human is just investing personally and reading the other person (AKA "god") as personal because of the lens they are using, when maybe there is no personal element.
